LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf.,___.kt&£> 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



PRESENT LESSONS 



FROM 



DISTANT DAYS 



BY/ 

WAYLAND HOYT, D.D., 

AUTHOR OF " HINTS AND HELPS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE." 



34V*2*J5 



NEW YORK: 

WARD & DRUMMOND, 

Successors to U. D. Ward, 
Il6 NASSAU STREET. 

(IBB)) 



Ths Library 
of cono^kss 



V 



vU* 



Copyright, 1881, 

BY 

WARD & DRUMMOND. 



TO MY FATHER, 

WHO IS TO ME 

THE BEST ILLUSTRATION 

OF THE 

NOBLE LIFE, 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Dedication, - 3 

Preface, 5 

CHAPTER I. 

The Call to the Noble Life, ... . . 9 

CHAPTER II. 

Trial — The Wrong Treatment and the Right, . 32 

CHAPTER III. 
The Power of a Bad Choice, . . . -57 

CHAPTER IV. 

Light on the Cloud ; or, Comfort for the Dis- 
couraged, 80 

CHAPTER V. 

Difficult Duty— The Way out— The Sacrifice of 

Isaac, . . . . . . 100 

CHAPTER VI. 
Marriage and Home, 124 

CHAPTER VII. 
The End, 150 

(5) 



All Scripture is profitable. It is a seed- 
bed of principles. Customs change, but the 
Human Heart remains. In these pages I have 
sought to bring the principles of the Ancient 
Scripture into contact with the Conduct of 
our Modern Life. If any path shall be made 
clearer I shall be glad and thankful. As far as 
"possible I have tried to indicate what sugges- 
tions I may have received from others through 

various reading. 

WAYLAND HOYT. 

Brooklyn, Feb., 1881. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE CALL TO THE NOBLE LIFE. 

FEW things can be more startling than to 
spend a day in disinterred Pompeii. 
There you are amid surroundings eighteen 
centuries old. There you stand in the same 
houses and in the same streets in which dwelt 
and walked the subjects of the Roman Emperor 
Titus. You see the well-curbs over the wells 
worn by the friction of the ropes. You see the 
ruts in the stone pavements of the streets hol- 
lowed by the wheels of the clumsy Roman 
carts. You see the bakers' shops and bakers' 
ovens, and sometimes even the loaves of bread 
put within those ovens by the bakers' hands 
on that fateful day when the volcanic ashes fell. 
You see the palaces of the wealthy and the 
homes 'of the poor. You enter the house of 
Sallust, of Marcus Lucretius, of Procolus, pre- 
cisely as you would that of your friend in any 

(9) 



io Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

modern city. You look upon the very frescoes 
glowing yet upon the walls in which they took 
delight. You are in their bedrooms and their 
dining-rooms. You wait beside the fountains 
which scattered coolness for them so long ago. 

Thus surrounded it is not difficult, by a lit- 
tle use of your imagination, to people those 
streets with their old inhabitants. It does not 
seem that it would be a hard thing to hold a 
conversation with Sallust or Procolus. You 
are living in the first century rather than in 
the nineteenth. The door of that ancient life 
is open for you ; you enter and behold it exactly 
as it was. 

Dean Stanley tells us that " the unchanged 
habits of the East " — the land of Abraham, the 
land of Moses, the land of Christ — "render 
it in this respect a kind of living Pompeii. 
The outward appearances, which in the case 
of the Greeks and Romans we know only 
through art and writing, through marble, fres- 
co, and parchment, in the case of Jewish his- 
tory, we know through the forms of actual men 
living and moving before us, wearing almost 
the same garb, speaking in almost the same 



The Call to the Noble Life. 1 1 

• 
language, and certainly with the same general 

turns of speech and tone and manners/'* 

So it is not very hard to get a quite clear 
vision of this ancient and Scriptural scene : 

" Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get 
thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, 
and from thy father's house, unto a land that I 
will shew thee. 

" And I will make of thee a great nation, 
and I will bless thee, and make thy name 
great ; and thou shalt be a blessing. 

" And I will bless them that bless thee, and 
curse him that curseth thee : and in thee shall 
all families of the earth be blessed. 

" So Abram departed, as the Lord had 
spoken unto him, and Lot went with him : 
And Abram was seventy and five years old 
when he departed out of Haran. 

" And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot 
his brother's son, and all their substance that 
they had gathered, and the souls that they had 
gotten in Haran, and they went forth to go 



* "History of the Jewish Church." First Series, 
p. 12. 



1 2 Present Lessons from Distant Days* 

into the land of Canaan :*and into the land of 
Canaan they came."* 

What was beheld on some day four thousand 
years ago, is to be seen now any day in that 
Eastern land. Look upon the journeyings and 
encampments of a Bedouin chief to-day, and 
you look upon a very nearly perfect picture 
m of the journeyings and encampments of Abra- 
ham way back there in the childhood of the 
world. 

Here come the camels, kneeling down with 
many a grunt and murmur, ready for their bur- 
dens. Yonder stretches the long and swaying 
line of them, making their noiseless way over 
the desert sands with cushioned feet. Round 
about them are the flocks of sheep and goats 
and asses cast into shadow by their towering 
forms. There is the patriarchal chief, the center 
of this stir of movement ; or when the hot noon 
comes, resting within his tent with the rest of 
the encampment grouped around. There is his 
tent, made of the black goats' hair, marked by 
his cloak of brilliant scarlet, at whose door is 



Gen. xii. 1-5, 



The Call to the Noble Life. 13 

set the spear, his symbol of authority. There 
is the tent for the chief's wife — her own tent in 
which she makes the cakes and prepares the 
usual meal of milk and butter.* 

As it is now, so was it then. Abraham was 
such a chief, and it was such a caravan which 
trailed along the desert sands and rested through 
the noon heats, and slept beneath the steady 
stars when the Father of the Faithful and the 
Friend of God departed out of Haran, with his 
face set toward the unknown country which 
God should show him. 

The question comes, Why the starting and the 
pushing onward of this caravan led by Abra- 
ham toward this unknown land ? 

The movement of this caravan is one of the 
pivot scenes of history. Or let me change the 
figure. Far up amid those Western mountains, 
forming the divide of the continent, burst forth 
the springs of the Missouri, that imperial river, 
the true Mississippi, draining the continent east- 
ward and southward, and furnishing a pathway 



* "History of the Jewish Church." First Series, 
pp. 12, 13. 



14 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

for the commerce of a nation. It is wonderful 
to stand beside those gathering springs and 
think of the journey those waters take, and of 
the vast duty they accomplish before they find 
their home in the distant Gulf. 

This caravan trailing across that Eastern 
desert forms the head-waters of our history and 
of our civilization. You and I are different 
because of that old-time journey. The face of 
human society wears other features because of 
that march of Abraham's, precisely as the face 
of our continent would wear other features 
had the Missouri never cut its channel. In 
this respect this ancient journey is full of inter- 
est and worthy of our study. 

And in another respect as well. This jour- 
ney, the motives which- led to it, and its out- 
come, form a picture and example of a true 
life, and the story of a true life never can grow 
old as long as men and women are born into 
this strange world and are to be set at living 
true lives amid its temptations, hindrances, 
sorrows, disappointments, mysteries. 

Why, then, did this caravan start, which we 
see moving across that desert amid the dim- 



The Call to the Noble Life. 1 5 

ness of four thousand years? What was the 
reason behind this setting forth by Abraham 
for the unknown country which God should 
show him ? 

Well, the country from which Abraham set 
forth, and the people whom he left behind, were 
a country and a people defiant in and damaged 
by idolatry. 

This Scripture tells us. If you will turn to 
the last address of Joshua to the assembled 
Israelitish tribes, when now at length they 
have entered into their inheritance, and are 
comfortably settled in the promised land, you 
will find that in the last chapter of the book of 
Joshua he uses language like this : Thus saith 
the Lord God of Israel, Your fathers dwelt on 
the other side of the flood — that is, the river 
Euphrates — in the old time, even Terah, the 
father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor : 
and they served other gods.* 

It is probable that the form of that ancient 
idolatry was the worship of fire and of the sun. 

There is an old legend — it is legend, it is not 



Joshua xxiv. 2. 



1 6 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

Scripture — which represents Abraham as him- 
self infected with this idolatry, but as subse- 
quently turning toward the true worship and 
standing for that : '' When night overshadowed 
Abraham he saw a star and said, This is my 
Lord ; but when it set, he said, I like not those 
that set. And when he saw the moon rising 
he said, This is my Lord ; but when the moon 
set, he answered, Verily, if my Lord direct me 
not in the right way, I shall be as one of those 
who err. x^nd when he saw the sun rising, he 
said, This is my Lord ; this is greater than the 
star or moon. But when the sun went down, 
he said, O my people, I am clear of these things ; 
I turn my face to Him who made the heaven 
and the earth." * 

But whether the legend be true or not, this 
much we may safely say of Abraham : he lived 
in a country of idolaters ; his fathers and his 
relatives were idolaters. Perhaps, as other le- 
gends say, he was the only one who really and 
resolutely stood for the worship of the true 



* Quoted in " History of the Jewish Church." First 
Series, page 19. 



The Call to the Noble Life. 1 7 

God. This much is true : Ur of the Chaldees 
was an idolatrous country. It was aland of sin. 
And now to Abraham dwelling amid such 
sinful scenes and surroundings, and possibly 
himself somewhat infected by them, comes the 
call of God. Now the Lord said unto Abra- 
ham, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy 
kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a 
land that I will shew thee. The Lord of glory 
appears to him, Stephen tells us.* What the 
shining was, how the voice spoke, we do not 
know. This we do know : God called Abraham. 
It was a peremptory, commanding call. Get 
thee out unto a land that I will show thee. It 
was a call to the rupture of the old ties of the 
past. It was a call to a long and difficult jour- 
ney in the present. It was a call to mist and 
uncertainty for the future, only overarched by 
this shining word, that Abraham should not 
go forth unled and on a fool's errand, but to 
a land which God should show him, where he 
should find blessing for himself and his pos- 
terity. 



* Acts vii. 2. 
2 



1 8 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

Here, then, were the reason and the motive 
behind this journey — Obedience to the Call of 
God and Faith in the Word of God. 

Well, is this all of it ? — just that nearly four 
thousand years ago Abraham took this journey 
across the shifting desert sands from some- 
where in the northern part of the Assyrian 
plains, southward and westward into Palestine, 
and that he did it in obedience to the com- 
mand of God, and that subsequently his pos- 
terity became a mighty nation, who through 
their religious ideas have influenced the world 
— is this all of it? No. 

This ancient journey has a very real and 
practical relation to you and me. I said just 
now that the story of a true life never could 
grow old, as long as men and women were set 
at living true lives in this troublous world. I 
have been writing what I have in order that 
you might see the practical relation of this 
ancient journey to yourselves the more clearly. 
For the principles and motives underneath 
that, are the principles and motives which 
must necessarily be those underneath a true 
life anywhere. And so I ask you in the light 



The Call to the Noble Life. 19 

of this old story of Abraham as I have so far 
told it, to think with me a little about a mat- 
ter very practical to every one of us, namely : 
The Call to the Noble Life. 

Notice first, that the call to the noble life is 
always a call primarily to yielding, to sacrifice. 

That was the first thing which struck on 
Abraham's ear when God called him. Get 
thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, 
and from thy father's house. Get thee out, 
leave them behind, yield them. The journey 
took its rise in sacrifice. 

And the reason is evident enough. Abra- 
ham's was a country and kindred of star-wor- 
shipers, and moon-worshipers, and sun-wor- 
shipers. But Abraham was chosen by God 
for this very thing — that he might be kept and 
nurtured in the worship of Jehovah, and that 
into the minds of his posterity might be thrust 
and fixed the thought of the one only and 
righteous Lord. In order to this, Abraham 
and his posterity after him, must be separated 
from the influence and infection of idolatry. 
And so the first step for Abraham in the way 
to this noble life and destiny, was neces- 



20 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

sarily a step of yielding, of sacrifice. He 
must put behind him the bad infection. The 
worship of the Sun and the worship of Jeho- 
vah could not coincide. Whatsoever could 
cause mist between the face of Abraham and 
the face of the true God must be yielded, even 
though it might be country, kindred, father's 
house. Yielding — sacrifice ; this then was and 
must be the first syllable in the divine call. 

Now here is something I would call a struct- 
ural truth. When a man would build a temple, 
or a bridge, or an aqueduct, he must build it 
according to some structural idea, or he can 
not build at all. If he is to build a gothic tem- 
ple with its curved lines, and pointed arches, 
and lifted turrets, and soaring spire, he can 
not build a Grecian temple with its straight 
lines and sides, and roof rectangular. If he 
is to build a suspension-bridge, he can not 
build a bridge upheld on arches. If he is go- 
ing to run an aqueduct underground, he can 
not run it as the ancient Romans did upon pil- 
lars braided together by graceful masonry. The 
structural idea is king; king it must be. So it 
is with life. You can not help building life 



The Call to the Noble Life. 21 

after the fashion of the main idea. And now 
just here I find a structural truth for life; that 
by no other gate possibly can you enter upon a 
noble life than through just this gate of a grand 
yielding — of a thorough sacrifice. I say it rev- 
erently, and yet I say it. not even God himself 
can build you another gate. 

And the reason is evident enough. If Abra- 
ham is to be solely and simply a worshiper of 
Jehovah, then he must yield and put aside 
those things which would clash with and hin- 
der his worship of Jehovah. That is to say, 
choice of God must exclude the choice of 
whatever is opposed to God. 

And do not think that this inexorable neces- 
sity of a primal yielding is confined to the re- 
ligious life. It is rather a necessity as wide as 
life, and as many-sided. 

Here is the Canaan of a competency open- 
ing before some young man. Well then, if he 
would enter it, he must get out of the country, 
and kindred, and father's house of indolence — 
of late hours at night, and late hours in the 
morning — of carelessness in the use of money, 
of un thrift. 



22 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

Here is the Canaan of learning, of scholar- 
ship opening before some young man. Well 
then, if he would enter it, he must get out of the 
country, and kindred, and father's house, of 
shabby study, and indiscriminate hurried read- 
ing and misty half knowledge. 

Here is the Canaan of physical health open- 
ing before somebody. Well then, if he would 
enter it, he must get out of the country, and 
kindred, and father's house of dissipation, and 
liquor-drinking, and licentiousness. 

Anywhere and everywhere a choice excludes 
its opposite. Its opposite must be yielded. 
You must build an altar, and bind to the horns 
of it as a sacrifice whatever opposes. There is 
no other way. There can be no other. 

And so God's call to the noble life in Him, 
must be first of all a call to yielding. If with 
Abraham you would serve and worship God, 
then that which hinders must be gotten out of. 

"Stop a minute. Just here I once fought 
for my soul's life, and by the grace of God 
won it." 

" Pray tell me about it," the friend replied. 

" It happened in the time of my clerkship 



The Call to the Noble Life. 23 

soon after coming from my country home to 
the city. I left my room one Friday evening 
for a stroll by this Back Bay. While standing 
here a moment, I was hailed by a young clerk 
whom I had often met in Kilby Street. He 
was two years older than myself, smart, clever, 
with an air and manners that to me were very 
attractive. 

" Looking toward the 'hill' over there, then 
notorious for its haunts of evil* pleasures, he 
said : 'I'm so lucky to have met you ; now 
come up the hill with me, we'll have such a 
nice time.' 

" Young and social myself, it seemed impos- 
sible to resist. How could I ? Having taken a 
few steps toward the hill, all at once the sight 
of the chapel in the rear of the church re- 
minded me of an indefinite promise I had 
made to an old friend that I would join him 
some time on Friday evening at the weekly 
prayer-meeting there. But I was moving the 
other way. It seemed now as if I heard his 
voice of warning : l If you go yonder to-night, 
you will never again feel like going to the 
chapel. Which party will you join; answer?' 



24 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

> 
" It was the crisis of my life. Here I stood 

where two ways met. The debate was torture. 
I prayed inwardly. Power came. I stopped 
short, mentioned the pledge given to my older 
friend, bowed, and hastened to the chapel. ,, 

This is the true statement from his own lips 
of the entrance into the noble life of a great 
merchant. 

Do you not. see plainly now the hill and the 
chapel could not go together ? How in order 
to meet God in the chapel the young man must 
sacrifice the Sin upon the hill ? 

Yielding : this is necessarily the first syllable 
in God's call to the noble life. Where idolatry 
hinders His worship, you may not tarry. Get 
thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, 
and from thy father's house. 

But in the second place will you notice that 
the call to a Noble Life, is a call to Keeping. 

It is a very common notion of the Noble 
Life — the Christian life — that it is a life alto- 
gether of yielding and of sacrifice ; that its 
closest designation is that of restriction, nar- 
rowness, gloom, pleasurelessness ; that its best 
symbol is the monk's cell, with its stone floors, 



The Call to the Noble Life. 25 

and grated windows, and dim light; and not the 
open heavens with the blue sky and streaming 
sunshine, with flowers beneath the feet, and 
graceful trees scattering the benediction of 
their tender shade above your head. 

How many does this notion keep from the 
Noble Life. There is the wicket gate, and 
here is the Pilgrim. Says the Pilgrim, If now 
I pass through that narrow gate, then for all 
my life I can have nothing wider. Ah ! he 
forgets the Beulah land and the shining city. 

Now what I want to try to have you under- 
stand, is, that you are wrong altogether here ; 
that while the wicket gate is narrow, it is not 
so narrow, that while the first note of the call 
to the noble life is always and necessarily a 
call to yielding, the second note is just as 
clearly and soundingly a call to Keeping. 

Let us look at Abraham and see it all illus- 
trated in him. Get thee out of thy country, 
and from thy kindred, and from thy father's 
house — leave them, separate thyself from them. 
Yes, that was certainly the first rough accent 
of the call. But let us see in what plight 
Abraham must go out in obedience to the call. 



26 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

Must he go out a man stripped of everything? 
Must he go out a lonely pilgrim to take his 
solitary way along the desert sands? Must he 
have no camel to ride on, no tent to rest in, 
nothing which shall cheer his pilgrimage, noth- 
ing whatever of the possessions and the dear 
delights of life? 

Why, look and see, certainly it is not thus 
that Abraham goes forth in obedience to the 
call of God. Listen : And Abram took 
Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and 
all their substance that they had gathered, 
and the souls that they had gotten in Haran, 
and they went forth to go into the land of 
Canaan, and unto the land of Canaan they 
came. 

Abraham is by no means a man bereft of 
everything going out in obedience to God. 
The gate of that Noble Life is certainly wide 
enough to take in a great many things besides 
Abraham's simple self. What things he had 
before God's call, those things he has now, that 
it has come and he obeys it. A prosperous 
man before, he is a prosperous man after. 
That call of God, which certainly was a call to 



The Call to the Noble Life. 27 

yielding, is just as certainly a call to keeping 
too. 

What is the principle underlying here ? Why, 
it is just the principle which the Apostle so 
magnificently enunciates : " For all things are 
yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, 
or the world, or life, or death, or things pres- 
ent, or things to come; all are yours"* The 
call to the Noble Life is a call to a grand keep- 
ing after all. 

But let us look at Abraham there a moment 
somewhat minutely, and see just what he must 
yield, just what he may keep. 

Country, kindred, fathers house — these he 
must yield. Why ? because, as I have shown 
you, these were all infected with idolatry, and 
tarrying among them would be the obscuration 
of Abraham's devotion to the one true God. 

Sarah his wife, Lot his brother's son, all 
their substance that they had gathered, the 
souls that they had gotten in Haran, these he 
might keep. Why? because these were in 
nowise hindrances to the true worship of the 
true God to which Jehovah called him. 



1 Cor. iii. 22, 23. 



28 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

He must yield what hindered, and that was 
all he must yield. He might keep, and hold, 
and enjoy everything which did not hinder. 

The Noble Life is not one narrow and re- 
stricted, and crowded only with the piercing 
spears of sacrifice. The monk's cell is not its 
symbol. That Canaan toward which Abraham 
was going, that good land with its lifted ranges 
of the snowy Hermon, beautiful in their white- 
ness against the deep blue of the eastern sky 
— with its broad and fertile intervales golden 
with their harvests, with its hill-sides draperied 
with grape-vines, with its flocks and herds, 
with its sweet streams fighting away the desert, 
with its pomegranates and its figs, with its 
homes and its joys, and its peace, and its wor- 
ship — that is its symbol. Only the infected 
things, the wrong things, the hindering things, 
only these must you yield. Every rightful 
thing, everything which will not prevent you 
from God, every cultured taste, every innocent 
pleasure, everything upon which you can feel 
that God's smile rests ; these are yours, not to 
yield, but to keep, and to be but the more 
blessed in their keeping, because just as the 



The Call to the Noble Life. 29 

sunshine brings out the colors of the flowers, 
the sunlight of His smile shall make appear 
the more radiant colors of your joys. 

But in the last place, the call to the Noble 
Life is a call to Following. Get thee out of thy 
country, and from thy kindred, and from thy 
father's house unto a land that / will show 
thee. 

I remember a passage from " De Quincy " 
which moved me deeply when I read it, be- 
cause it spoke so ter my inner heart : " All men 
come into this world alone. All leave it alone. 
Even a little child has a dread whispering con- 
sciousness that if he should be summoned to 
travel into God's presence, no gentle nurse 
will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor 
mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sis- 
ter to share his trepidations. King and priest, 
warrior and maiden, philosopher and child, all 
must walk those mighty galleries alone ! " Have 
you never thought of that? Have you never 
been sometimes appalled at your own loneli- 
ness ? You have been perhaps captured in a 
fog : mist behind, before, around. And you 
shut away from everybody and straining your 



30 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

eyes never so hard though you might, not know- 
ing exactly the way to go. Is not that like your 
life and mine? Alone and unable to see much. 

And have you not felt at such times that 
your deepest need was a hand to clasp yours 
and a voice to tell you the way ? A hand great 
enough to lead you, and a voice searching 
enough and tender enough to reach your soli- 
tary soul. 

Well, that is for you and for me too, just that. 
When a man gives himself to God as Abraham 
did, then God does not play false to that man, 
as He did not to Abraham. God can not. He 
must disown His nature first. 

Unto a land that I shall show thee. And if 
you are only true to God, if you only choose 
Him first and foremost, then all His great di- 
vine leadership falls down upon you like a 
mother's love. You may not be able to see 
the way. I am quite sure Abraham could not ; 
he did not know where that track over the 
desert was taking him ; but, though you may 
not be able to see the way, you may be very 
sure you are in the way, because God has 
pledged to you His leading. 



The Call to the Noble Life. 3 1 

And when at last the end is reached, and the 
shadows fall thickly, and the buffeting breath 
will only come in gasps, and it grows so 
strangely dark, and your grasp loosens on the 
hand of every earthly friend ; why, even then 
you need fear no evil, for the Leader's hand is 
still upon you, and the Leader's voice shall 
whisper sustainingly though you can hear no 
other sound — Unto a land that I will show 
thee. 

And then the music-burst of the angels, and 
the welcome of the Master! The land is 
gained. 



CHAPTER II. 

TRIAL — THE WRONG TREATMENT AND THE 
RIGHT. 

THAT was a very wonderful country to 
which God led Abraham, of which He 
had said, " Unto a land that I shall shew thee."* 

It was to be the home of the posterity of 
Abraham, to whom were to be made and who 
were to keep the revelation and the knowledge 
of the One true God. 

Precisely to this end was this land of the 
Divine showing adapted. There was no other 
patch of country on the earth's surface so ad- 
justed to such an end. It was no accident 
which set the feet of the Father of the Faithful 
within such confines. 

Two things were true of this singular Ca- 
naan, which Abraham reached at last after that 



* Genesis xii. 6, 20; xiii. I, 4. 

(32) 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment. 33 

desert journey toward the unknown, in obedi- 
ence to the call of God. 

It was a land of Isolation. It is bounded by 
a " great sea of land on the east, and by a great 
sea of waters on the west." It is a land shut 
in by mountain ranges on the north, and by 
waterless wastes upon the south. The sea-coast 
is sheer and harborless. The mountain ranges 
are high and hostile to travel. The stretches 
of sand and barrenness on the eastern and the 
southern sides are broad and difficult to cross. 
It is a land secluded — standing apart strangely. 
As is no other on the habitable globe, it is a 
ground alone. 

Why God should show Abraham such a lonely 
country, is evident enough ; looking backward 
as we do on the history of it, and not forward, 
as Abraham must toward the future. Evil 
communications corrupt good manners. There 
is the mighty power of a bad atmosphere. Sin 
is contagion. Custom is a tremendous social 
force. Public opinion is a tidal tendency. The 
world over idolatry had gotten the upperhand. 
Instead of the One God, there were gods many. 
The sun, the moon, the stars, and even the ob- 
3 



34 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

jects of a worship less natural and intelligent 
had usurped the worship of the Supreme. 

Now God had a great lesson to teach man- 
kind — the lesson of His personality, of His 
unity, of His authority. He chose to teach it 
through the revelation to, and the culture of, a 
single designated man, and afterward of a sin- 
gle designated nation springing from that man 
as ancestor. Abraham and his descendants 
must be put at school for the learning of the 
grand lesson. What they needed was seclusion 
for the thorough learning of it. Just as we put 
children into quiet schools and colleges for 
their better culture, for the profounder and 
quicker study of that which they will need 
when life begins to task them, so God chose 
for Abraham and the Israelites a guarded 
school and college defended by seas and mount- 
ains and deserts, that there, with hostile influ- 
ences hindered, they might grasp and grow 
into the first truth of all true religion — that of 
the spiritual, personal, single, holy Jehovah. 

But this other thing, besides, was also true of 
that singular Canaan. 

While it was a land isolated, it was also a 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment. 35 

land central and in relation with other coun- 
tries. Palestine combined in a marvelous way 
these two opposite qualities of seclusion and 
of intercourse. " It lies at a corner where 
Asia, Africa, and Europe meet, or all but touch. 
The six ancient States of Babylon, Assyria, 
Media, Persia, Phoenicia, and Egypt stood 
round about it. The main lines of ancient 
traffic ran close past its border. Whenever for 
purposes of war or trade bodies of men sought 
to pass from the populous and powerful States 
of the North, whose center lay along the Eu- 
phrates, to the populous and powerful States of 
the South, whose center lay along the Nile, 
there was only one road by which they could 
travel/'* alongside of or through Palestine. 
Why, that plain of Esdraelon, in the northern 
part of Palestine, has been oftener the place of 
the battle-clash of opposing nations than any 
other single spot in the broad earth. Says Carl 
Ritter, the great and famous modern German 
geographer : " No country is so situated in re- 



* 'Abraham the Friend of God," by Oswald Dykes, 
D.D., page 49. 



36 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

lation to three great continents and five great 
bodies of water. None unites such amazing 
contrasts — perfect isolation and independence, 
with the ability to go out from this isolation 
and establish- relations with all the greatest na- 
tions of antiquity."* 

Why God chose such a land of openness, as 
well as of seclusion, for Abraham and his de- 
scendants is also evident enough. 

Israel was to learn the undermost religious 
lesson of the one true God not for itself alone. 
It was God's promise to Abraham that in him 
should all families of the earth be blessed. 
Abraham and Israel were to be a fountain send- 
ing forth their waters — not a pool keeping its 
waters to itself. Channels were needed for the 
waters. Having gotten the knowledge of God, 
Israel was to spread the knowledge of God. 
When seclusion had wrought its work, then 
intercourse was to do its duty. There was 
chance for both, and for both in the same 
land. Is it not wonderful ? Did I not speak 



* Quoted in "Abraham the Friend of God," by Os" 
wald Dykes, D.D., page 51. 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment. 37 

rightly when I said a moment since it was no 
accident which set the feet of the Friend of 
God within such confines? 

I said there were two things — seclusion and 
chance for intercourse — peculiar to this land 
which God declared He would show Abraham. 

There was a third thing. The essence of re- 
ligion is dependence. The religious spirit is a 
spirit which all the time confesses that it hangs 
on God — on God and on God only — in the last 
analysis. Not on the stability of the seasons ; 
not on the certainty of the early and the latter 
rain; not on the seed-sowing and the harvest ; 
not on the steadiness of natural law, but be- 
hind all and causing all and moving all on God. 
The utterance of the religious spirit is the song 
of the Psalmist : " The eyes of all wait upon 
Thee. Thou givest them meat in due season. 
Thou openest Thine hand and satisfiest the de- 
sire of every living thing." 

Now this Canaan was a country singularly 
fitted to be the training ground of such relig- 
ious dependence. It was a country of fertile 
soil, and of most various production. Wheat 
waved there : grapes hung there ; figs clustered 



38 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

there ; pomegranates abounded there ; grasses 
sprang dense and nutritious there ; herds 
crowded there ; milk and honey flowed there. 
But at the same time it was a country fre- 
quently and suddenly susceptible to severe dis- 
aster. The snow-clad mountains bred some- 
times frosty winds biting to their vitals the 
tender crops. The outlying and yet not dis- 
tant desert sands sometimes prevented with 
their hot breaths the early or the latter rain, or 
sent forth blistering breezes before which the 
crops fell fainting. So a threatening of uncer- 
tainty hung constantly over the dwellers in that 
country. They could not fix their faith on un- 
certain seasons ; they were forced to send 
their faith beyond them, that it might clasp the 
certain God. Iron regularity did not breed 
doubt of the value and reach of Prayer. Every 
now and then there would come crises when 
Famine would force to prayer. Materialism 
could not build its low dome above them and 
shut out the Heavens. Men were pushed into 
the constant thought of a higher Presence ; 
and, to use Herbert Spencer's word, their very 
" environment" ministered to dependence upon 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment. 39 

Jehovah. It is easy enough to see how such a 
training ground was needful for a people who 
were to be the depositories and the preachers 
of the truth of God. 

So much, then, for the country in which 
Abraham found himself, listening to the Divine 
call and going forth under the Divine leading. 
This is the practical point — evident certainly 
from all I have been saying. Standing there in 
Canaan, Abraham was standing in the place of 
his duty, and that place of duty was precisely 
adapted to the designs of God for Abraham, to 
the realization of the noble destiny God meant 
for him. So it was for Abraham henceforth 
the place most right and the place most safe. 
I but repeat a truism when I say that the place 
of Duty is the right place, and in the highest 
sense the safest place for any man. 

Lord Macaulay* tells us that at the siege of 
Naumur, in the year 1695, on the 17th of July, 
the first counterscarp of the town was attacked. 
The English and Dutch were thrice repulsed 
with great slaughter, and returned thrice to the 



* " History of England." Vol. 7, page 242. 



40 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

charge. At length, in spite of the exertions of 
the French officers, who fought valiantly, sword 
in hand, on the glacis, the assailants remained 
in possession of the disputed works. While 
the conflict was raging, King William Third 
of England, Prince of Orange, who was giving 
his orders under a shower of bullets, saw with 
surprise and anger, among the officers of his 
staff, Michael Godfrey, the deputy-governor of 
the Bank of England. This gentleman had 
come to the king's headquarters in order to 
make some arrangements for the speedy and 
safe remittance of money from England to the 
army in the Netherlands, and was curious to 
see real war. Such curiosity William could 
not endure. " Mr. Godfrey," he said, " you 
ought not to run these hazards ; you are not 
a soldier ; you can be of no use to us here." 
" Sir," answered Godfrey, " I run no more haz- 
ard than your Majesty." " Not so," said Wil- 
liam ; " I am where it is my duty to be, and 
I may without presumption commit my life to 
God's keeping ; but you — " While they were 
talking a cannon ball from the ramparts laid 
Godfrey dead at the king's feet. Well, the 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment, 41 

cool, clear-headed king but told a truth to 
which no human heart can help responding. 
The place of duty is for every man the sacred- 
est and in the noblest sense the safest. Mr. 
Godfrey was foolishly meddlesome, hazardous, 
not courageous, and merited his fate. 

But now — there is this common fallacy about 
the place of Duty. Sunny skies, blooming 
flowers, smooth paths — Canaan, with never a 
cold breath from snowy Hermon, with never 
a hot breath from the neighboring sands, with 
the unfailing falling of the early and the latter 
rain, making the grass green and the flowers 
glow — that is the place of Duty, we are all 
and always too apt to say. We are in a con- 
stant wonder if we do not find it so. 

And yet we can never always find it so, not- 
withstanding our continual surprise. There 
is, indeed, "a sun behind the sun," shining 
ever upon the place of duty. There is a sweet 
and inward consciousness of right. There is a 
profound, abiding satisfaction in the being and 
the doing what we ought. That higher sun is 
undimmed always. But the lower sun of out- 
ward circumstance, of apparent and quick 



42 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

success, of an external pleasantness, is dimmed 
often by disastrous clouds, and seems some- 
times even to be altogether blotted out. 

That is to say, the place of Duty is quite as 
often the place of a rocky trial as of smooth- 
ness ; and because in the place of Duty, Trial 
comes upon us and frightens us with its stony 
pitiless gaze, and seizes us in its cruel hands, 
we are not for that reason to think we are not 
in the place in which God would have us 
stand. 

Why, there were those early Christians in 
Lystra and in Iconium and in Antioch. Paul 
and Silas were on a missionary tour, and they 
had a special divine message for these Chris- 
tians ; and this was their message : They went 
from place to place, " confirming the souls of 
the disciples and exhorting them to continue 
in the faith, and that we must through much 
tribulation enter into the kingdom of God." * 
There these disciples were, squarely where they 
ought to be; in their houses and in their busi- 
ness places, and in the streets of those wicked 



* Acts xiv. 22. 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment* 43 

cities they were trying to do their duty, to be 
Christian, to pierce that heathen darkness with 
the shining of Christian lives ; they were in the 
Faith; but because they were just where they 
ought to be, they could not therefore expect 
safe and sunny times. Paul and Silas came to 
them to tell them they must expect something 
expressly different ; that we must through much 
tribulation enter into the kingdom of God. 
Though they were just where they ought to 
be — in the faith — yet Trial was to grip them. 
The domain of Trial includes the place of 
Duty. Some one else has suggested these four 
reasons for Trial : 

Trial is for probation. "A man must be 
proved before he can be approved.' ' Trial is 
training. And just as a tree would die if it 
stood always in the sunlight, with never the 
cooling wrap of the night air, or the rain drop- 
ping from the dull cloud, or the push of the 
tempest straining the roots in its hard wrestle 
making them grasp the ground more firmly, 
so our souls would flag and flatten into a poor, 
tame imbecility if we were not sometimes even 
roughly proved by Trial. 



44 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

Trial is for purification. It is the furnace 
which consumes the dross and sets the gold 
free for its mission of beauty or of value ; and 
there is nothing which burns away the dross of 
evil motive in us — if we only meet it rightly — 
as does a touch of Trial. 

Trial is for fellowship with God, with the 
Highest and the Holiest. The hills of Canaan 
are very beautiful when the grass is green and 
the grapes are plenty. But grass and grapes are 
not the thing a Soul can live on. Yet there is a 
constant tendency to test the value and success 
of life by such low things as these. Like the 
rich man in the parable, we are so apt to think 
more of the filled barns than of the God who 
gave the harvests, compelling us to widen out 
the barns. So the pleasant hills must grow 
sometimes scant and the vines refuse to drape 
themselves along the trellis, in order that, 
forced from the decaying Earthly, new thought 
may rise to the substantial Heavenly — to real 
and longing fellowship with God. 

Trial is for the sake of others. No man 
liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. 
We are braided together in this world of ours. 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment 45 

A religion stalwart in a storm is the kind of 
religion other people caught in storms can get 
heart by. To suffer well and nobly is some- 
times the most helpful ministry we can possibly 
be engaged in.* 

The place of Duty does not always lie out- 
side the domain of Trial. Often the place of 
Duty is the place of Trial. 

It was thus just now with Abraham. Here 
he was standing in the land to which God had 
promised He would point him. As I have 
shown you, it was the very land best fitted to 
accomplish God's designs, and to lead Abra- 
ham onward into the lifted destiny God meant 
for him. He had not been in it very long. He 
had only tarried for a little time in Sichem, and 
then gone southward into the more open coun- 
try of the plain of Moreh, and then passed up- 
ward and eastward to a place overlooking the 
beautiful country in the neighborhood of Bethel, 
and builded altars for God's worship, and had 
a precious season of the shining of God's 



* " The Little Sanctuary," by Alexander Raleigh, 
D.D., pages 32, 42. 



46 Present Lessons fro?n Distant Days, 

special presence, for the Lord appeared unto 
him ;* before Trial struck him with its harshest 
blows. There he was just like a modern Be- 
douin chief; with a great train of dependents — 
family, servants ; with crowding herds — camels, 
sheep, goats, asses ; with ever so many mouths 
to fill, absolutely dependent for supply upon 
the grasses, and the grains, and the grapes the 
country should produce. And then the clouds 
began to refuse to gather in the sky ; the cease- 
less sun began to drink the wells and streams 
away; the pleasant verdure on the hill-sides 
and in the plains was all burned up ; and 
Famine began to lay its hunger on the people 
and its death upon the herds. 

There \vas little commerce in those days. 
The fullness of one portion of the earth was 
not quickly carried to supply the emptiness of 
another portion. There Abraham was, shut up 
to famine ; hunger was in his tent ; hunger was 
in all the tents; hunger was in the herds ; and 
thirst as well ; and death stood upon the heels 
of thirst and hunger. 



* Gen. xii. 9. 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment. 47 

I remember I was riding through the wilder- 
ness of the Northwest once on a long march 
and in a desperately hot day, and through a 
very sterile country, and for a long time we 
could come upon no stream. We searched 
every gully which we passed, but each only 
mocked us, and the yards seemed to lengthen 
into miles. We grew so faint, and the animals 
began to fail ; and then how refreshing were 
the waters of the stream we did strike at last 
toward nightfall; how we hailed it, and were 
thankful for it as we saw it in the distance ! 
And I remember thinking then what a terrible 
thing it would be to have the water all dried 
up along a march of many days, and to have 
the grass all turned to ashes by the hot rays of 
the sun. 

Well, Famine in its worst form struck Abra- 
ham. He was in the place of Duty, but at the 
same time he was in the grip of Trial.* 

And now the vital question was — precisely 
the question which you and I must often be 
compelled to meet in this trial-ful life of ours — 



* Gen. xii. 10. 



48 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

How should he treat this Trial, striking him 
here in this country which God had shown 
him — in the place of his Duty? 

Now, because a man figures in the Bible, we 
are not, therefore, to put ourselves upon the 
:mnt for all manner of excuses for his wrong- 
doing. I am sure we are never to do that. I 
am sure that is just the way for us to miss some 
of the most valuable teachings of the Bible. 
A reverence for the Bible which compels us to 
that, is not reverence; it is idolatry. Wrong is 
wrong, inside the Bible as well as outside of it. 
We ought the rather to bravely say, he may be 
a Bible character, but he did this and that 
wrong thing, and what I am to do is to profit 
by his example and shun such wrong; shun it, 
not tumble into it, though we have for it even 
the example of a Bible saint. Such examples are 
given us in the Bible, not that we may do the 
same, but that we may refuse to do the same. 

Now I am sure that Abraham answered this 
question of how he should treat this Trial, 
meeting him here in the place of his Duty in 
the wrong way. 

Notice this wrong treatment of Trial, that 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment. 49 

by contrast we may find out the right. We 
have seen that this Canaan which God showed 
Abraham was a country susceptible to sudden 
and severe disaster, like this of Famine. Egypt 
was not such a country. It was not dependent 
upon rain. Through its entire length there 
swept the fertilizing steady Nile. Twice every 
year that river overflowed its banks. When its 
waters had receded, there was left a deposit of 
the richest soil, soaked with their moisture ; 
out of that soil the harvest quickly sprung, and 
its roots were kept unwithered amid the fiercest 
heat by constant irrigation from the river. So, 
while there might be Famine gaunt in Pales- 
tine, there would be opulence in Egypt. 

And now even Abraham did this pitiable 
thing. Instead of standing in the place of his 
Duty in Canaan and meeting his Trial with an 
unfaltering trust in God, he ran away from his 
Duty and relaxed his trust in God. " And 
there was a famine in the land, and Abram 
went down into Egypt to sojourn there, for the 
famine was grievous in the land."* There is 



* Gen. xii. 10. 



50 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

no hint that he asked God's counsel. He did 
not pray about it at any of God's altars. He 
took matters into his own hands, and ran. 

Notice now what of result came to Abraham 
through this wrong treatment of his Trial; for 
it was just as true for Abraham as it is for any 
other man, that while he was a king in the 
realm of choice, he was a slave in the realm 
of the result of choice. It was given to Abra- 
ham, as it is to you and me, freely to do wrong 
if we may so choose. But neither could Abra- 
ham nor can you or I hinder the issue and 
moral blight succeeding a wrong choosing. 

This was the first result : He lost the consci- 
ousness of the Divine favor, the shining of the 
Divine presence, the privilege of prevailing 
prayer. For, search the chapters through and 
you can not find that in Egypt Abraham lifted 
any altars toward his God. That was the first 
thing he did, however, when he reached Ca- 
naan. He was constantly lifting them there, one 
at Sichem, one at the mountain east of Bethel, 
calling upon the name of the Lord, and the 
Lord answering in blissful and visible appear- 
ance. This he did not do in Egypt — never 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment. 5 1 

once. And he did not, because he could not. 
He had put a chasm between hnnself and God. 
He had thrust his wrong into God's face. He 
could not pray through it. No incense of any 
altar could pierce it ; no shining of God's pres- 
ence could stream through it. He was pre- 
cisely in that place in which God could not 
bless him. He was in Egypt, not in Canaan. 

This was the second result : Fear forced him 
into mean deceit. How brave is that man who 
is sure he is standing in his Duty ; how jubi- 
lant the consciousness that even the stars in 
their courses are fighting for him ; how free 
his soul ; how certain is he that he is in the 
clasp of the Everlasting Arms. Conscience 
makes cowards of us all only when we are out 
of the place whither conscience points. In 
that place this same conscience will gird us 
with a triple armor. But when we stand in 
Egypt rather than in Canaan, what shapes of 
various fears assail. 

The Egyptian females were noted for their 
want of beauty. They were not shapely, they 
were dark-skinned. 

But Sarah, the wife of Abraham, was beauti- 



5 2 Present Lessons from Distant Days* 

ful to look upon. She was of fair complexion, 
and since people lived so much longer then 
than they .do now, was just now in the full 
bloom of her matronly prime. 

And the King of Egypt, as is the manner of 
Oriental monarchs, was in the constant quest 
of beautiful women ; and if a husband chanced 
to stand inconveniently in the way, that made 
no difference. For His Absolutism it was the 
easiest thing in the world to slay the husband 
and capture the wife. All this Abraham knew. 
And with the knife of his wrong, stabbing to 
the heart his trust in God. he was naturally 
enough shaking with a selfish fear. And this 
fear forced him into the meanest possible de- 
ceit. So Abraham said to Sarah : " Behold, 
now I know that thou art a fair woman to look 
upon. Therefore it shall come to pass, when 
the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall 
say, This is his wife : and they will kill me ; 
but they will save thee alive. Say, I pray 
thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well 
with me for thy sake ; and my soul shall live 
because of thee."* Could anything be more 



* Gen. xii. 12, 13. 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment, 53 

cowardly and more cruel ? — for cowardice is al- 
ways cruel. Everything noble, straight, coura- 
geous, seems to ooze out of Abraham at once. 
He is a serpent sneaking in the grass; he is 
not Abraham. He will even dare to think of 
saving himself behind the dishonor of his own 
wife, and will do that along the crooked 
squirming of a lie. O, conscious inward wrong 
and outward and poor pretence are in bad 
marriage ! He only can be the morally brave 
man who is the morally right man — Egypt is 
fertile in meanness. It is only in Canaan that 
you can grow nobleness. 

This was the third result : Injury to others. 
This was a promise holden, while Abraham was 
in Egypt, that in him should all families of the 
earth be blessed. That was only true for Ca- 
naan — the place of his Duty. He was a curse 
to others outside of that. For, when Pharaoh 
began to do as Abraham feared he would, then 
the Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with 
great plagues because of Sarah, Abraham's 
wife. 

O receive the solemn searching lesson ! You 
can not sin and keep it to yourself; sin is in- 



54 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

fection. It is only when a man stands in Ca- 
naan — ■ that is, in the place of his Duty ; 
bravely, trustfully stands there, even though he 
must stand there in the grip of Trial — it is only 
there, it can not be in Egypt, that his life shall 
be what harvests are — a blessing and a suste 
nance to others. 

I am very sure that the old story comes 
closely home to some of you. You are where 
God has placed you ; you stand amid such cir- 
cumstances ; such tasks are laid upon you ; 
you are in such a family, or in such position ; 
you are in Canaan. But right there where you 
are standing such strange Trials come. You 
can not understand the reason. Often these 
Trials seem beyond endurance. Your heart 
fails you. How can you wait and look upon 
the famine-blighted hills? 

But treat your Trial rightly and not wrongly. 
Do not run from Duty. Stand and trust, even 
though Famine fasten. Do not pass over even 
into the Egypt of a heart-rebellion of whining, 
of a hopeless drudging way of doing what you 
ought. So long as you are in Canaan you can 
keep God's altar lifted. The mighty resource 



Trial — Wrong and Right Treatment. 55 

of Prayer is left you — use it, stand firmly, 
trust ; and in His time the smitten hills shall 
surely grow green again, and the dusty chan- 
nels of your life sparkle with the waters of de- 
light. And if you have gone over into Egypt, 
why, then as for Abraham, so for you, there is 
only just one thing to do. " And Abram went 
Tip out of Egypt/' " Unto the place of the altar, 
which he had made there at first : and there 
Abram called on the name of the Lord."* 
Penitence for the past; Re-entrance into Ca- 
naan, that is the only thing for you to do. 

Wait a little while, 

Be sure 
Thou'st but one short lifetime 

To endure. 

Wait a little while, 

And trust ; 
Thou shalt suffer only 

What thou must. 

Wait a little while ; 

Above 
Is the God who gives you pain 

In His love. 



* Gen. xiii. 1-4. 



56 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

Wait a little while ; 

His grace 
Soon shall bear you quickly 

To His face. 

Only be sure of this — Canaan is the place 
for waiting. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE POWER OF A BAD CHOICE. 

I AM monarch in my choices. I am slave 
in what my choices bring me. — I do not 
know a principle for life more controlling, or 
one which needs to be more steadily kept in 
mind. 

I was lying upon the ground after a very long 
mountainous ride in the Yellowstone National 
Park. The men were pitching the tents and I 
was waiting for them. It was a very beautiful 
prospect which met my eye — an intervale of 
smooth and fertile prairie — hills yonder clothed 
with dense forests, and far off in the blue dis- 
tance a range of mountains. 

One who knew the country came to lie by 
my side, and said, u Do you see those mount- 
ains in the distance?" "Yes." i( Do you 
know what they are?" " No, sir. What are 
they ? " " They are a part of the divide of the 

(57) 



58 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

continent. The water falling on this side 
those mountains goes flowing onward to the 
Gulf of Mexico. The water falling on the 
other side finds its home at last in the Pacific. ,, 

So I lay there thinking how diverse the des- 
tiny of the water-drops scattered out of the 
clouds hovering about those summits. How 
soon and how certainly will a continent sepa- 
rate them, though they make their home now 
in the same cloud. What a slight thing will 
send them here or there — a twist of wind, a 
pebble forcing their flowing but a little this 
way or that. 

And then the analogy of all this to our hu- 
man lives came solemnly upon me. How do 
our destinies diverge and keep diverging as 
they flow on from dividing choices. What 
slight things apparently often determine the 
choices which thenceforth rule our lives. 

Yon stream whose sources run 

Turned by a pebble's edge, 
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun 

Through the cleft mountain ledge. 

The slender rill had strayed, 
But for the slanting stone, 



The Power of a Bad Choice. 59 

To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid 
Of foam-flecked Oregon. 

So from the Heights of Will 

Life's parting stream descends ; 
And as a moment turns its slender rill, 

Each widening torrent bends. 

From the same cradle side, 

From the same mother's knee, 
One to long darkness and the frozen tide, 

One to the peaceful sea.* 

We are unlike the water-drops in this — that 
concerning many things, and in great measure, 
we may choose the side to fall on, either this or 
that. The ability to do this is part of our moral 
endowment. It constitutes us moral beings. 
This is one of the fundamental facts of con- 
sciousness. This is one of the axioms I must 
begin with and stand on. This is one of the 
foundations of the Throne of Conscience. I 
am uncompelled. I may elect my path. I do 
freely choose. I can turn toward the Atlantic, 
or I can turn from it and go to the Pacific. 

We are like the water-drops in this — that 



* Oliver Wendell Holmes. 



60 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

having chosen, and keeping on in our prevail- 
ing choices, we must be held inexorably to their 
results. We can not escape the destiny toward 
which they tend. Having chosen, our power 
passes ; we come under the power of the 
results of our choices. We must pluck their 
bloom. We can not go toward the Atlantic and 
toward the Pacific at one and the same time. 
Either here or there we may go ; but having 
chosen, just as the trend of the country and 
the courses of the channels and the force of 
gravitation pull the water-drops either Atlantic- 
ward or Pacificward as was the mountain-side 
from which it started, so does the destiny po- 
tential in our choice compel every one of us. 

It is a solemn thought, but a very true 
one ; we may choose, but from that which our 
choices hold we can not escape. 

This fact of dividing choices, which give 
thenceforward their own tendency and color 
to all our lives, comes out steadily in all litera- 
tures. Xenophon relates the myth of Hercules. 
When Hercules stood upon the threshold of 
his manhood, he went apart to think what his 
future course should be. Soon two female 



The Power of a Bad Choice. 61 

figures stood before him ! One in white ap- 
parel, noble in mien, open and innocent in 
gaze ; the other, much painted and bedizened. 
Drawing nearer, this last ran briskly up, saying, 
" Oh, Hercules, I see that you are perplexed 
about your path in life. Make only a friend of 
me. I will lead you along the smoothest and 
most charming road. I will see that you are 
not troubled with business, with battles, with 
tasks of any kind. This shall be your study: 
where to find the most luscious dishes and the 
best wines, the most fragrant scents, the finest 
clothing, the merriest companions, the maddest 
amusements. And I will surely provide you 
too with supplies for all these things." 

"And what may be your name?" asked 
Hercules. 

u My name is Pleasure/' she replied ; " though 
my enemies have nicknamed me Vice." 

Then the other and the nobler drew near, and 
this was how she spoke : " Hercules, I knew 
your parents ; and as I have seen you in your 
boyhood, I am sure that you are capable of 
shining deeds ; but I must not deceive you 
with delusive promises. As the Higher Powers 



62 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

have arranged the world, you can hope for 
nothing good or desirable without labor. If 
you want the gods to be your friends, you must 
serve them ; if you want your field to be fruit- 
ful, you must till it. If you would have Greece 
honor you, you must do genuine duty in her 
behalf. If you wish to be a mighty warrior, 
you must bring the body under subjection and 
submit to discipline." * 

Hercules rose up to follow Virtue. Thus he 
made his choice. Thus the rewards which 
Virtue held were his. He slipped the doom 
of. Vice because he chose the way of Virtue. 
But the resulting doom of Vice must have been 
his, had he chosen rather to make her com- 
panion along the way of life. Even the strong 
Hercules, though king to choose, was slave to 
take what his choices brought him. 

Now this old fact of choice and its inevitable 
results — a fact as old as Adam, and yet as fresh 
and new as the beating pulses of the youngest 
heart — appears in the Scripture which tells of 
Abraham and Lot in Palestine.t 



* " Memorabilia." Book 2d, chap. 1st. 
\ Genesis xiii. 



The Power of a Bad Choice. 63 

Abraham had come back from Egypt, and 
Lot had returned with him. They were both 
prosperous men. They both had flocks and 
herds and tents. It began to require very roomy 
pasture to support them. Both must have suf- 
ficient grass; both must have sufficient water. 
So, frequent quarrels began to clash between 
their respective herdsmen and retainers about 
the boundaries of pastures and the right to 
springs and wells. Where quarrels threaten to 
become chronic, it is better to separate than to 
keep up constant war. Often to agree to dif- 
fer is the best way to stop a quarrel. Abraham 
makes a very right and w r ise proposal for sepa- 
ration. (t And Abraham said unto Lot, Let there 
be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, 
and between my herdsmen and thy herdsmen, 
for we be brethren. Is not the whole land be- 
fore thee ? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from 
me. If thou wilt take the left hand, then I 
will go to the right ; or if thou depart to the 
right hand, then I will go to the left."* 

It was probably from the summit of the hill 



Gen. xiii. 8, 9. 



64 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

on which Abraham's altar stood that the two 
men looked down upon the landscape. In most 
directions the prospect was not inviting to a 
shepherd's eye. Northward the fair and fertile 
vale of Sichem was hidden by the intervening 
mountains. Westward and southward broken 
hills tossed their rocky tops in irregular ranges 
toward the sky. Between them grasses grew 
indeed, and streams went murmuring on, but 
these could not be seen for the crowding and 
barren peaks. But eastward the view was dif- 
ferent. There, between the rocky walls on 
either side, the long green valley of the Jordan, 
with its abundance of water and its fringe of 
trees and its margin of pasture rich and deep, 
met the eye ; and there to the south and east, 
where the Jordan found its home in the salt 
sea, the mountains halted, and a broad, smooth 
intervale appeared, more like the level plains of 
Egypt than was usual in Palestine, welcoming 
with a fresher greenness, in scattered flowers 
aiid gathered groups of trees telling of a fertil- 
ity more prolific, more like that Eden whose 
memory still lingered in men's thoughts — a 
spot beautiful even as the Garden of the Lord. 



The Power of a Bad Choice. 65 

" Ah," said Lot, " I will turn eastward. You 
may have the barren mountains and all the fer- 
tile patches you can find between. I will 
choose this country which is as the Garden of 
the Lord."* 

So there on that hill-top, east of Bethel, Lot 
determines. He is free to do it Now, like 
the water-drops falling on different sides of the 
divide of the continent, Abraham and Lot sep- 
arate for their diverse destinies. Lot has 
chosen the side on which his life shall fall. But 
having chosen, his choice pushes out the hand's 
of its results and grips him. Thenceforth he is 
beneath their power and not above them. The 
water-drop goes flowing onward to its proper 
sea. 

It is the Power of a Bad Choice which the 
scene suggests. Look, then, that we may dis- 
cover in what respect this choice of Lot's was 
bad. 

Consider. It was essentially a selfish choice. 
In all this record there is no hint of any defer- 
ence on the part of the younger toward the 



* Gen. xiii. 11, 
5 



66 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

older man. Nor is there either any hint of 
gratitude for such chance for choice proffered 
by Abraham. The first thought with Lot is 
plainly Lot himself — where he shall get on the 
fastest ; where his flocks and herds shall have 
the richest range and the best water. Since 
Abraham has been so foolish as to present him 
with such opportunity, he will make the most 
of it. As to how Abraham can get on, that is 
not his matter. He makes poor start in life 
who pushes out into it thinking only of himself. 
Selfishness is malaria. There can be no such 
thing as high moral health, and so there can be 
no strong joy in the life which chooses the low 
country where such fog falls. 

Consider again : that in another respect this 
choice of Lot's was bad. Amid the fragrant 
shades of that plain which seemed as beautiful 
as the Garden of the Lord, gleamed the white 
walls of at least five cities. These towns were 
doubtless very small in themselves, but were 
large compared with the then scanty popula- 
tion of the world. They nestled there among 
palm-trees and groves of balsam — a genial sun 
above, the most fertile soil around. Sodom was 



The Power of a Bad Choice. 67 

the largest and the most influential. She al- 
ways leads her sister cities in any speech about 
them. The inhabitants were builders. Sodom 
was a walled city. They were agriculturists too. 
Slight toil made the harvests laugh about them. 
They were traffickers and merchants also. 
Sodom stood on the main high-way for passage 
between Babylon and Egypt. Well, what has 
happened so often since, happened there and 
then. Wealth flowed in upon the people dwell- 
ing in those towns. Then leisure and luxury 
came in the train of wealth ; and out of these 
sprang up the most shameless license. Vice, dis- 
soluteness, corruption, abounded. From those 
days down to these Sodom has been the syno- 
nym for vice of the worst sort. Those cities, 
led by Sodom, cradled there in one of the fair- 
est places of the earth, had become the earth's 
worst plague spot. Afterward — even during 
the life of Abraham and Lot — God wiped them 
out for their very wickedness. That was a 
terrific doom the Scripture hints at.* It was 
early in the morning. The sun had risen 



* Gen. xix. 23, 28. 



68 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

bright and clear. Perhaps there was a strange 
oppressiveness in the air; perhaps there were 
dense thunder-clouds beginning to wrap the 
mountain summits. Nearer the storm comes, 
and blacker grow the clouds, and swifter the 
flashes of the lightning. It is a fearful storm, 
say the inhabitants; but it will be over soon. 
It will pass as other storms have passed before 
it. But it does not pass; it is nearer; it is 
denser; it is more awful every moment. The 
birds have stopped their singing. The chil- 
dren are frightened from their play. The 
streets of the busy city have grown empty ; 
men and women hold their breath for terror. 

Now a new danger threatens. Perhaps it 
was the lightning ; perhaps it was other fire 
falling straight from heaven. I do not know. 
But that soil was saturated with bitumen. 
They have baked their bricks from such clay 
as this, and used the bitumen as mortar to 
hold their bricks together. And the flame 
from heaven is answered now by flames spring- 
ing upward from the earth. Doubtless the 
ground shakes in the grip of the earthquake 
too. The buildings flame and fall, and flame 



The Power of a Bad Choice. 69 

still though fallen. " Houses and temples 
sought for shelter proved only tombs." The 
Lord overthrows these cities and all the plain 
and all the inhabitants of the cities and that 
which grew upon the ground ; and when Abra- 
ham looked from a mountain height toward 
where the cities were, lo, the smoke of the 
country went up as the smoke of a furnace. 

It was cities nurturing such wickedness and 
soon to merit such a doom which lay within 
this choice of Lot's. He did not choose the 
beautiful country simply, he chose the cities 
too. The men of Sodom were wicked and sin- 
ners before the Lord exceedingly.* Yet this 
fact did not make Lot hesitate in his choice. 
Therefore his choice was bad, because he 
knowingly turned whither wrong was raging 
and defiant; because he said, Notwithstanding 
the evil festering in the beautiful plain, I will 
yet take the plain. 

And now, having made this bad choice, will 
you be kind enough to go on with me to notice 
in what respects Lot came under the inevitable 
and evil power of it. 



* Gen. xiii. 13, 



70 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

Consider, first : In making such bad choice 
Lot came under the power of the fascination 
of the evil which the choice held. Evil is a 
fearful magnet, and men are bits of steel. It 
is so* easy, when you willfully put wrong next 
you, when you surround yourself with its at- 
mosphere, to become enervated and entangled 
and overcome. 

Old Dr. Emmons preached for fifty years in 
Franklin, Mass. He was a great preacher, and 
he was also very pertinacious and even whim- 
sical in his determination to do nothing but 
preach, and study that he might preach. He 
lived upon a farm, but he himself would not 
farm it. His place was in the study and in the 
pulpit. The farm must get on as best it could 
through hired hands. One day, they say, he 
was walking round his farm for exercise, and 
he came upon a place where somebody had left 
down the bars, so that the cattle could get 
through and eat and trample down the crops. 
It was his first impulse to put up the bars and 
save his crops. But no, the stiff old man took 
a second thought. He fell back on his favor- 
ite maxim : " If I say A, I must say B " ; if I 



The Power of a Bad Choice. 7 1 

begin, I must go on. He left the bars down 
and started for his study. 

That may seem foolish, but there was a good 
deal of wisdom in it. If you do say A, it is so 
easy to say B, and you are so likely to say it. 
If you choose the plain in which Sodom and 
Gomorrah lie, it is so easy to pass from the 
plain into the bad cities, and you are so likely 
to do it. Why, you find yourself there almost 
before you know it. 

It is better to go with Abraham, even to the 
barren heights. The safe side is the wiser 
side. Concerning the putting one's self under 
the fascination of the wrong, discretion is al- 
ways the better part of valor. It is better to 
be a poorer man than to become a rich one by 
doing business, if not within the gates, yet un- 
der the shadow of the walls of Sodom and 
Gomorrah. If you choose to do business there, 
before you know it you will very probably go 
into the gates. It is better to be a little stiff 
and unaccommodating, and even illiberal and 
fanatical and puritanic, as people call it, than to 
be so immensely liberal that you are quite care- 
less as to whether your way lies through Sodom 



72 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

and Gomorrah or not. Lead us not into temp- 
tation, but deliver us from the evil, was the 
daily prayer the Master set upon our lips ; and 
that man is a fool who, like Lot, rather rushes 
into temptation, entwines about himself an evil 
fascination, chooses the plain which seems so 
fertile and so pleasant, notwithstanding the 
walls of Sodom and Gomorrah gleam out from 
among its trees. 

For, most significant are the touches of the 
Scripture concerning the effect of the evil fas- 
cination wrapped up in this bad choice of Lot. 
First : Lot chose the plain with Sodom and 
Gomorrah in it Second: He pitched his tent 
toward Sodom — got a little nearer — got within 
the easier hearing of its siren songs. That is 
to say, to translate the action into the speech 
of our common life, the edge of his protest 
against such evil began to wear somewhat 
away ; he was less in high and earnest desire 
to please God ; he gave up secret and family 
prayer ; he was not quite so distinct and clear- 
voiced in his confession of godliness — pitched 
his tent toward Sodom. And then, w r hen after- 
ward the angels came to w r arn him of the de- 



The Power of a Bad Choice, 73 

struction threatening the city, they found him 
sitting in the gate of Sodom ; he had become 
one of the inhabitants of it : more than that, 
one of the magistrates of it; for the seat in the 
gate was the seat of the magistrate. 

First the plain, with Sodom in it, chosen ; 
then the tent pitched toward Sodom ; then the 
high seat in Sodom. Evil is a fearful magnet, 
and men are bits o£ steel. 

Consider, further : In making such bad 
choice, Lot came under the necessity of an en- 
feebled warning against evil. 

In a certain sense, Lot was a good man. In 
obedience to the Divine command, he set out 
with Abraham on his wanderings. The Apos- 
tle Peter, speaking of him, says : " And God 
delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy con- 
versation of the wicked ; for that righteous 
man dwelling among the men of Sodom, in 
seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul 
from day to day with their unlawful deeds. n * 
I suppose it is barely possible for a man to be 
a Christian, and at the same time be in places 



* 2 Peter ii. 7, 8. 



74 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

where a Christian ought never to be seen. I sup- 
pose it is possible. Paul says it is possible — for a 
man to really build on the only foundation, the 
Lord Jesus Christ ; but on that foundation, in- 
stead of rearing the noble, shining structure of 
a lifted life — gold, silver, precious stones — to 
rear instead a shabby and pitiable structure — 
wood, hay, stubble — which structure the fire 
shall test and consume, though the man him- 
self may be saved yet so as by fire,* his life- 
work burned up, himself just saved. I sup- 
pose that is possible. But the difference of 
that man's life must be, compared with a clear, 
consistent, steady life, the difference between 
gold and the stubble the cattle trample on in 
the autumn weather. I suppose Lot was a 
very poor Christian. And he was such a Chris- 
tian, because, making his inconsistent choice as 
to the place and method of his life, he came 
under the inevitable results of such a choice. 
And, as I have said, another of these results 
was this, that his testimony against evil became 
utterly enfeebled, and worth nothing. 



* i Cor. 111. ii, 15. 



The Power of a Bad Choice. 75 

A Christian is a witness. The word martyr 
means literally a witness — a man who stands 
for God at any cost, whether the stones strike 
him, or the flames scorch him, or the rods tor- 
ture him. But nobody's witnessing for God is 
worth the breath he uses, if lip and life are 
speaking all the time a different language. 
Paul, writing to Timothy, says : Give heed to 
thyself and to thy doctrine. Be sure of your- 
self, Timothy ; be sure that your life is the in- 
carnation and illustration of your doctrine; 
then your preaching will be with power. It is 
the life which gives efficacy to the speech. 
Words are but the helpless balls lying beside 
the cannon. It is only the cannon of the life 
which can send them straight and telling to the 
mark. Now Lot, living there in Sodom, sought 
to do this duty of witnessing for God in Sodom. 
But living there, and sitting in its gate, his 
speech had neither push nor edge. Said the 
Sodomites, <; Stand back," when he tried to 
make them better. Said the Sodomites again, 
" This fellow came in to sojourn, and he must 
needs be a judge/'* 

* Gen. xix. 9. 



76 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

And then, at last, he is sure the Lord is about 
to send destruction on the city. He is certain 
the rain of flame will fall. The angels have 
told him so. He is anxious and agitated for 
the safety of his family. H And Lot went out, 
and spake unto his sons-in-law, which married 
his daughters, and said, Up, get you out of 
this place ; for the Lord will destroy this city. 
But he seemed as one that mocked unto his 
sons-in-law."* 

" Thou must be true thyself, 

If thou the truth wouldst teach ; 
It needs the overflow of heart 
To give the lips full speech." 

Lot, living there in Sodom, coming thus un- 
der the dominion of his bad choice, how could 
he seem otherwise to his sons-in-law than one 
who mocked? 

Consider, further : in making such bad 
choice, Lot came under the necessity of bring- 
ing injury to those he loved the best. I need 
not wait to tell how the volcanic storm over- 



* Gen. xix. 14. 



The Power of a Bad Choice. 7 7 

took his wife lingering in her flight. It is not 
fitting that I tell of the terrific influence this 
Sodom had upon his daughters. This is the 
fact, however : you can not make a bad choice 
for yourself, and hold the power of that bad 
choice within your single self. 

Consider, further : in making such bad 
choice, Lot must come measurably, at least, 
under power of the doom belonging to it. 

Sodom's fall was Lot's as well. 

The doom falls, and on him too, fleeing a 
lonely pilgrim to the very mountains he had 
despised before — family ruined, possessions 
gone, his own life but just saved — a shattered 
man, getting the doom of a bad choice. 

The old story but tells in its own way the 
real story of every life. 

It is given you to choose. That you may 
freely do ; but you must get what the choice 
holds. 

Shun Sodom and Gomorrah; never mind 
the beauty of the plain in which they lift their 
gleaming walls. 

Bad books are a Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Bad friendships are a Sodom and Gomorrah. 



78 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

Bad places are a Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Bad habits are a Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Here you stand; here you must stand on 
the mountain east of Bethel, and take your 
choice. 

But. remember as you take it, you must get 
what your choice shall hold : the mountain or 
the plain ; the noble destiny of Abraham ; or, 
the pitiable failure of Lot. 

I read of the ermine to-day, 
Of the ermine who will not step 
By the feint of a step in the mire ; 
The creature who will not stain 
Her garment of wild white fire. 

Of the dumb, flying, soulless thing 
(So we with our souls dare to say), 
The being of sense and of sod, 
That will not, that will not defile 
The nature she took from her God. 

And we with the souls that we have, 

Go cheering the hunters on 

To a prey with that pleading eye. 

She can not go into the mud ! 

She can stay like the snow, and die ! 



The Power of a Bad Choice. 7 9 

The hunters come leaping on. 
She turns like a hart at bay. 
They do with her as they will. 
. . . O thou who thinkest on this ! 
Stand like a star, and be still. 

Where the soil oozes under thy feet, 
Better, ah ! better to die 
Than to take one step in the mire. 
Oh ! blessed to die or to live, 
With garments of holy fire !* 



* Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 



CHAPTER IV. 

LIGHT ON THE CLOUD; OR, COMFORT FOR 
THE DISCOURAGED. 

LET us think together of an old story of 
long waiting and final winning which I 
am sure comes very close to all our lives. 

Back there in the beginning, God's call to 
Abraham had been accompanied by a Promise : 
"Get thee out of thy country, and from thy 
kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a 
land that I will shew thee : and I will make of 
thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and 
make thy name great; and thou shalt be a 
blessing: and in thee shall all families of the 
earth be blessed."* So companioned with the 
call came the Promise. It was no fool's errand 
on which Abraham was setting out. His des- 
tiny was not to be like that of some rivers I 
have seen in the western country, starting in 

* Gen. xii. i, 3. 

(80) 



Light on the Cloud. 81 

their pilgrimage of refreshing and flowing on 
for many a mile, and then sinking down ex- 
hausted and coming to nothing in the sands. 
His life was not to be all sacrifice. He was 
not commanded to that fearful march from 
country, from kindred, from father's house for 
naught. With the rugged notes of the call was 
mingled the music of a Promise. He was to 
sacrifice, but sacrifice was only a rougher path 
to a smooth and shining end ; out of its thorns 
was to blossom a better destiny than Abraham 
otherwise could possibly have gained. It was 
not all cross for Abraham, it was crown too, 
and the cross was but the ladder, climbing up 
which, he should reach and wear the crown. 
He was not to remain a simple Bedouin chief, 
captain of a clan ; he was to become the father 
of a mighty nation, and was to fling abroad 
the richest blessings on other nations too. 
But, between the little chiefhood and the 
grand fatherhood stood sacrifice ; but also arm- 
in-arm with sacrifice, like the stars shining 
out of the night, stood Promise; and strength 
for the sacrifice was to come out of faith in 
the Promise. 
6 



82 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

What was true for Abraham, is just as true 
for you and me. There comes to us no call of 
God how rough and heavy soever its yoke 
may seem, that is not cushioned too with Prom- 
ise, that does not point onward and upward 
from itself to some vast and burdened blessing 
which otherwise we could not gain. You must 
yield a bad habit ; yes, but in order that you 
may enter into a great self-mastership. You 
must endure chastisement — a cradle emptied, 
a bright hope darkened, a pain which must 
keep up its piercing, like that thorn in the 
flesh which would go on stabbing the apostle 
so ; yes, but in order that it may yield the 
peaceable fruits of righteousness to you being 
exercised thereby. You must be crucified with 
Christ; yes, but in order that you may reign 
with Christ. You must renounce the world ; 
yes, but in order that you may have Heaven. 
Christianity is not all cross ; it is some crown — 
and a good deal of crown. " For I reckon 
that the sufferings of this present time are not 
worthy to be compared with the glory which 
shall be revealed in us," declares the apostle. 
Married to the ruggedest duty is the Promise of 



Light on the Cloud. 83 

blessing always. It was so to Abraham ; it is 
so to you and me. Cross and Crown is your 
complete symbol of Christianity. Let us re- 
member this amid our toilful waiting lives, and 
get hope and take courage. 

Only this is also to be said : The stringent 
jagged call sounds in the present ; the Promise 
Qoming with it points to the future. JVow, the 
weary way across the desert sands, with coun- 
try, kindred, father's house resolutely left ; 
there — in the future, after the desert journey — 
there in Canaan, that is to say, in the region 
of accomplished duty, and also when God 
shall think it best, then and there, the shadowy 
Promise turned into substance by fruition. 

And the energy to do the duty, the strength 
to bear the burden, to be found where ? Why, 
as I» just now said, it is to be found here ; it 
can be found nowhere else, this is where it is 
to be found, in faith in the Promise. 

Well, Abraham yields to the call, and puts 
faith in the Promise, and goes on and enters 
Canaan. He has now been several years in 
Canaan. Abraham was a childless man when 
he made his sacrifice and set out on that com- 



84 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

manded journey. He had been always child- 
less ; and he was by no means a young man at 
the time of his setting out. He was seventy- 
five years old, and Sarah his wife was sixty-five. 
Up to that time he had never once listened to 
the music of the voice of his own child. Never 
once had his tent been rendered joyful by a 
child's prattle. Never once had he felt the 
dear weight of his own child upon his knee. 
He was way on past maturity also. He was 
not an old man, as we should call it — for peo- 
ple lived a great deal longer then than they do 
now ; but he was not by any means a young 
man. He had passionately desired children ; 
everybody did then. At least in this respect 
those were better times than these in which we 
live. Sarah thought it a terrible reproach that 
she was never mother. But with the call comes 
the Promise of a child — dimly at first, but really. 
Of Abraham is to be made a great nation, God 
says. This can only be as Abraham shall be- 
come a father and Sarah a mother. I am sure 
this promise must have been a great comfort 
to Abraham and to Sarah. There was sweet 
solace in it to them as they toiled on in the 



Light on the Cloud. 85 

long and difficult way toward the country, in 
which their lives were to be so enriched with 
the fulfillment of their deep desires. 

But they have reached the land together 
now, and their tent is just as silent and empty 
as it has always been. They have stayed in the 
land for several long years, and still their tent 
is voiceless of a child. They have been much 
blessed in other ways. Abraham was a pros- 
perous man whan he set out; he is a man 
much more prosperous now. " And Abraham 
was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold," 
the Scripture tells us. He has become a very 
mighty chieftain, too, in those years, and a suc- 
cessful warrior as well. 

After his kinsman Lot had made that bad 
choice of his, and had gone to live in Sodom, 
the city had been captured by the kings of 
cities in another portion of the country, chiefly 
under the command of Chedorlaomer, king of 
Elam, and Tidal king of nations. Lot had been 
captured also with all his property, and had 
been carried off. When Abraham hears of it, 
he arms three hundred and eighteen of his own 
drilled servants, and, following the capturers 



86 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

way up northward into the neighborhood of 
Dan, he skillfully falls upon them in a night sur- 
prise, and rescues all the booty, and his brother 
Lot as well.* 

Abraham is a person held, too, in very great 
repute. His name and position are most hon- 
orable. When he returns from this daring and 
successful expedition, Melchizedek, king of 
Salem, and priest of the most high God, comes 
forth to congratulate him, and to bless him 
publicly, bringing him bread and wine.f 

Every way and on every side the best things 
seem to come to Abraham, except the one 
special thing which he desires most of all, and 
which is absolutely essential to lift him into the 
high destiny God has promised him. He is 
still childless. His tent is just as silent and as 
empty as it ever was. 

I think, too, Abraham must have been just 
now in a despondent reaction after a great 
strain. The anxiety about Lot and that mili- 
tary expedition had tasked him terribly. He 
had been successful; but he had been obliged 



* Gen xiv. f Gen. xiv. 17-20. 



Light on the Cloud. 87 

to pay the price of success, just as you and I 
must, if we would ever reach any — namely, 
the price of thought, and skill, and toil. Abra- 
ham did not blunder into his success any more 
than you or I can. And because Abraham 
was a man just like any one of us, he was un- 
der the usual law that after any great strain 
and expenditure, reaction must set in. And 
amid the nervelessness of such reaction, even 
our success is apt to look strangely dimmed 
and our disappointments are apt to grow very 
large, and to cast exceedingly dark shadows 
over our success. And, also, I am quite sure 
that this gloomy mood was increased in Abra- 
ham by the fear that these kings whom he had 
just now vanquished would reorganize, and 
come down upon him in strong attack. 

I think all this, because the word of God, 
which just now comes to him, seems to be a 
word exactly answering to just such a mood as 
this. 

After these things — after all this fighting and 
strain, and amid all this fear, the word of the 
Lord came unto Abraham in a vision, saying : 
" Fear not, Abraham : I am thy shield, and thy 



88 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

exceeding great reward."" 4 Just the sort of 
comfort a man in such a plight would need, 
you see — that God would guard him round, 
and that God would lift him up. 

And now right here, in this familiar inter- 
course with God, the great trouble of Abra- 
ham's heart and life comes out. It is very- 
easy to picture him to ourselves. Here he is, a 
man who has sacrificed a great deal and done 
a great deal through faith. This has been sus- 
taining him all along — making him the nobly 
obedient man he was ; this Promise that out of 
his hard sacrifice, and out of his weary wan- 
derings, God is going to bring glory to His 
own name and blessing to himself and others, 
through making him a great nation, and there- 
fore through the giving him a child. But he 
has watched and waited for years; and now, 
in this time of gloom, the whole thing begins 
to look very misty and uncertain to him. He 
tells his thoughts boldly to God — just as you 
and I should in our daily prayers. God is 
Father, and fathers are not angry when their 



* Gen. xv. I. 



Light on the Cloud. 89 

children tell their troubles to them. And 
Abraham said: " Lord God, what wilt thou 
give me, seeing I go childless, and the posses- 
sor of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus ? 
Behold, to me thou hast given no seed, and be- 
hold a son of my house is mine heir." And 
then there follows a reiteration of the Promise 
on the part of God in more distinctive shape than 
it had worn before : " This shall not be thine 
heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine 
own bowels shall be thine heir."* 

And then the Lord illustrates the glory of this 
Promise to him. He takes him out under the 
solemn stars and bids him look aloft. Travel- 
ers tell us that we know nothing of the beauty 
of the starry night in this Western land of 
ours. Far away in the wilderness of the North- 
west, up amid the mountains, where the atmos- 
phere is very dry and very clear, I think I have 
seen faintly what Abraham saw so fully on that 
ancient night. The stars there look not like 
shining flatnesses plastered on to the night, 
but like golden globes hung in the ether. 



Gen. xv. 2, 4. 



90 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

You can see way behind them as your eye fol- 
lows on and on into the infinite spaces ; and 
more of them, too, appear. The Oriental sky 
is wonderful in this regard, men who have seen 
it say — as to its splendor, as to the immense 
number of the brilliant spheres. 

" Look up," God said to Abraham. " Canst 
thou tell the stars to number them ? So shall 
thy seed be. ?■** 

Then God ratified this Promise in solemn 
and symbolic covenant with Abraham — entered 
into engagement with him that He would keep 
His word by the cloven goat and ram, and by 
the birds, and in the horror of a great darkness, 
but illumined by the smoking furnace and the 
burning lamp, f And Abraham believed in the 
Lord, and He counted it to him for righteous- 
ness. The strengthened faith of Abraham took 
hold of the Promise with a fresh grasp. He 
was strong again. His heart was comforted. 
It should all be surely as God had said. He 
would believe on and wait God's time. So Abra- 
ham goes on into the new life of this great faith. 



* Gen. xv. 5. f Gen. xv. 9, 17. 



Light on the Cloud. 91 

It is a great thing when a husband and wife 
are united in the same faith. It is a great thing 
when they stand in equal faith, and so together 
pass forward into the uncertain years. Usu- 
ally when a man and wife are believing people, 
it is the wife who is the more so. It is she who 
gets the firmest hold upon the divine Promises. 
It is she who rests on .them the more utterly. 
It is she who, by many a faithful word and by 
the serene example of her trust, gives heart to 
the husband's failing courage; gives swiftness 
to his more laggard steps. It was not so with 
Abraham and Sarah. Abraham was more a 
man of faith than Sarah was a woman of it. A 
childless waiting, even after this second mani- 
festation of the Promise, had shredded the faith 
of Sarah quite away, at least as far as her own 
concernment in the Promise went. They had 
now been together ten long years in the land that 
God had showed them, and still the fulfillment 
of the Promise was withheld. I quote just 
here another's words: "Nature and history 
prompted the union of one man to one wife in 
marriage, and it might have been presumed 
that God would honor His own institution. 



92 Present Lessons from Distant Days* 

But the history of the creation of man was for- 
gotten or unheeded, and the custom of the 
East prompted Sarah to resort to the expedi- 
ent of giving her maid to her husband for a 
second wife." And Abraham, instead of being 
led on in the right way by his wife, was led off 
in the wrong way by her. 

We will not wait to 'tell of all the pain and 
shame which came to Abraham and to Sarah 
from this false step. How, even though Ish- 
mael came into the tent, discord came with 
him ! How jealous Sarah grew, and then how 
cruel. How the mother and the babe were 
sent to wander in the wilderness ; and how the 
wrong deed perpetuated itself, even in the very 
character of Ishmael, who became a wild man, 
his hand against every man, and every man's 
hand against his — a kind of incarnation of 
the wayward faithless wrong out of w T hich he 
sprung. 

From the time of that second manifestation 
of the Promise, and the ratification of it, full 
fourteen years have sped away. Ishmael has 
been born, but Ishmael is not the promised 
seed. Still Abraham's tent is empty of the 



Light on the Cloud. 93 

true heir. I think Abraham had fallen into a 
lower sort of life since he had gone off in the 
wrong way. I suppose he tried to be content 
with Ishmael ; thought that God would only 
half fulfill His word ; that the full, clear glory 
of it was not to be expected, and that he must 
content himself with the son of a bondwoman 
for his heir. That is the way a great many 
Christians live. They do not think that'God 
means all He says. Possibly, He may mean 
half, but never all to them anyway. They 
must get on as best they can, with a little joy 
and a little peace, and be very thankful for 
that little, and never hope that they can have 
much more. I think it must have been in 
some such way as this that Abraham lived 
through these fourteen years, being quite con- 
tent with Ishmael, perhaps in a dull way, and 
thinking that he was all God had for him. 

And then God comes to break in upon him 
with another and better word of Promise still — 
He comes to him announcing for Himself a 
new name now, El-Shaddai — God Almighty — 
the God with whom nothing is impossible. 
Abraham, He says, I am the Almighty God ; 



94 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

walk before me, and be thou perfect — -that is, 
sincere in faith, upright. And then the Prom- 
ise is again renewed — in terms most unmistak- 
able. Abraham is to have a. son, and Sarah is 
to be its mother. Ah, God's thoughts for us 
are always greater than our thoughts of Him. 
You see during all these fourteen years of con- 
tentment with Ishmael, Abraham has not been 
gaining faith — he has been losing it. So when 
God makes this grand, distinct announcement, 
Abraham fell upon his face and laughed. 
Some think it was the laugh of joy. I think it 
may have been quite as likely the semi-incred- 
ulous laugh of a kind of faithless wonder, for 
this was what he was thinking in his heart : 
Shall a child be born unto him that is an hun- 
dred years old ? and shall Sarah, that is ninety 
years old, bear? Oh that Ishmael might live 
before thee ! * And yet there is still faith in 
Abraham, that is undermost. Now once more 
in the presence of the Promise, it rises up and 
grasps it. God writes His Promise now in the 
new name which He confers. Heretofore Abra- 



Gen. xvii. 17, 18. 



Light on the Cloud. 95 

ham has been Abram, that is, high father; now 
he is to wear the name of Abraham,* that is, 
father of a great multitude ; and his wife, who 
had been called Sarai, that is, strife, conten- 
tion, is now to wear the name of Sarah, that is, 
princess. f Also a fresh engagement on the 
part of God is entered on, which Abraham is 
to ratify by circumcision. J 

How long after this it was I know not, proba- 
bly not very long, and God makes new state* 
ment of His Promise still, this time in the ear 
of Sarah. Abraham is sitting in his tent-door 
one day amid the heats of noon. Three men 
stand by him suddenly. With true, quick Ori- 
ental courtesy and hospitality Abraham wel- 
comes them, and invites them to tarry for re- 
freshment. The meal is hastily prepared. 
Then one of them, who is spokesman and 
seems to be the peculiar representative of 
Jehovah, declares to Abraham that Sarah, his 
wife, shall have a son. As is the Oriental cus- 
tom, Sarah is not present with the guests. She 



Gen. xvii. 5. f Gen. xvii. 15. 

% Gen. xvii. 12. 



g6 Present Lessons front Distant Days. 

has retired behind a curtain of dark camel's- 
hair cloth, but she is near enough to hear the 
conversation ; and the announcement, she re- 
membering her age, causes her to break forth 
in a laugh of incredulity. To use another's 
words, " Through the curtained doorway of 
the tent that low laugh was noticed by the dis- 
guised representative of the Almighty Promiser, 
who having condescended to become man's 
friend, will not disdain to mingle in the con- 
versation of men or to meet their foibles with 
appropriate remonstrance. Wherefore did Sa- 
rah laugh ? Is anything too hard for Jehovah ? — 
were not words directly spoken to the woman, 
but they answered her secret mood. They 
shook her out of her flippant skepticism. They 
wrought a sudden alternation of shame and fear 
within her breast. She tried to cover unbelief 
with denial, speaking out loudly from the recess 
of the curtained tent : ' I laugh not.' Unseen 
though she was behind her curtain, the next brief 
and final word was addressed to her. It was the 
first word, so far as we know, ever spoken by 
superhuman lips to Sarah. It was to be the 
last. Upon her heart it left a painful reminder 



Light on the Cloud. 97 

of her sin in doubting God's merciful and 
powerful interposition in her history, as well as 
of His All knowledge and All-mightiness with 
whom she had to do. ' Nay, but thou didst 
laugh.' What wonder if Sarah disbelieved no 
longer."* 

So one day, though Abraham's years had 
numbered now a century, and though the 
years had sadly stricken Sarah too, the child of 
Promise was born into the Patriarch's tent. It 
was full a quarter of a century from the time 
of that first Call and Promise. But how per- 
fectly does the Promise turn to fulfillment at 
the last. They named him Isaac — that is, 
Laughter — not the laughter of faithlessness, of 
unbelieving amazement, but the deep, thankful 
Laughter of wondering religious joy, that God 
would keep His Promise even to such faith as 
theirs. 

And this was the cradle-song which Sarah 
sung above her babe : 

" Laughter hath God prepared for me, 
All who hear of it will laugh with me. 



* " Abraham the Friend of God," by Dr. Dykes, 
page 178. 

7 



98 P 7^ e sent Lessons from Distant Days. 

Who would have said to Abraham, 

Sarah giveth to children suck ? 

For a son have I born to him in his old age."* 

O discouraged one and troubled, let this 
light gather on the cloud for thee. God keeps 
His Promise to the last letter. The vision may 
tarry ; wait for it. Thou shalt surely see it. 

O discouraged one and troubled, God keeps 
His Promise even to such failing, imperfect, 
wavering faith as this. 

O discouraged one and troubled, I know 
what thou sayest : Abraham had word from 
God, speaking out of the sky, gleaming in some 
vision on which his faith could grip. That I 
have not. Nay, but thou hast. The Bible is 
full of Words from God. 

O discouraged one and troubled, I know 
what again thou sayest: Abraham had sure 
covenant and engagement with his God that 
He would make true His word. That I have 
not. Nay, but thou hast. The Blood of 
Christ is the Seal of the Covenant. 

O discouraged one and troubled, let me warn 



* Gen. xxi. 6, 7. 



Light on the Cloud. 99 

thee : do not do wrong that thou mayest the 
more quickly win the Promise— Ishmael did 
not bring Abraham blessing. 

O discouraged one and troubled, be not con- 
tent witr! any Ishmael when God will give thee 
Isaac. 



CHAPTER V. 

DIFFICULT DUTY — THE WAY OUT — THE 
SACRIFICE OF ISAAC. 

' T I 1HE surest way to know our gold is to 
-*- look upon it and examine it in God's 
furnace, where He tries it for that end, that we 
may see what it is. If we have a mind to know 
whether a building stands strong or no, we must 
look upon it when the wind blows. If we would 
know whether that which appears in the form 
of wheat has the real substance of wheat, or be 
only chaff, we must observe it when it is win- 
nowed. If we would know whether a staff be 
strong, or a rotten, broken reed, we must ob- 
serve it when it is leaned on, and weight is 
borne upon it. If we would weigh ourselves 
justly, we must weigh ourselves in God's scales, 
that He makes use of to weigh us."* 



* Edwards on the Religious Affections ; Works, 
Vol. III., page 210. 
(ioo) 



Difficult Duty. 101 

True words these of Jonathan Edwards, 
true for you and me, true for Abraham as well, 
back there among the dim shadows of the be- 
ginning of human history. Such words are the 
statement of a divine law for life. And it is 
this law, which, throwing its great circle round 
Abraham as well as round ourselves, brings his 
distant life into nearness to our own, rendering 
it companionable with helpfulness : this law, 
namely, that that life is the only valuable one 
which is the tested life, and which stands the 
test. 

And it came to pass after these things* — after 
all this previous history and experience. Abra- 
ham had looked into the stony face of trial 
and felt the threshings of its flail many times 
before — when he must endure that wrench from 
country, kindred, father's house ; when the self- 
ishness of his kinsman Lot must make the 
knife of separation cut more deeply still ; wfcen 
anxiety for Lot because of his captivity must 
pull at his heart-strings and draw him into the 
venture of a military expedition; when the 



* Gen. xxii. I. 



102 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

years must slowly gather till they made a quar- 
ter of a century before the promise should 
tardily burst into the blossom of fulfillment, 
and his tent grow musical with Isaac's prattle. 
And yet, after all these things — and the recep- 
tion of their various culture of firmness, and 
faith, and hope, testing was not done with him. 
He must meet now a trial, compared with which 
all these which were past and gone were but 
as summer zephyrs to the Euroclydon which 
caught the ship in which the Apostle sailed, 
and when neither sun nor stars in many days 
appeared. 

The strange, pathetic story — strangest and 
saddest in any literature — most singular and 
sad of any incident in the whole Bible. 

The hope deferred, which for so long had sick- 
ened the heart of Abraham, had now risen on his 
life like the coming of the sun. The faith which 
h«d waited for a quarter of a century was blessed 
now, and burdened with fruition. Here in his 
tent, in the sweet talk of the boy about his knee, 
in his growing strength of limb and strength 
of mind, in his beautiful youthhood, in the sat- 
isfying companionship of his fair, fresh man- 



Difficult Duty. 103 

hood — for Isaac had now reached about the 
age of twenty-seven years — had been yielded 
tangible and wonderful proof that, when God 
promised, His promises were yea and verily. 
Abraham could now see how he was to become 
the father of a mighty nation. Abraham could 
now see how in him all nations of the earth 
were to be made blessed. Rightly named 
Isaac, Laughter — that young man. He was 
sunshine to his father's heart. He was inter- 
pretation to all the mystery of his sacrifice and 
wandering. He was the child of the Covenant. 
He was the bridge over which the best boons 
of God were to march onward into the far-off 
years. What hopes made halo for his head. 
What freight of the Divine Verity did he not 
carry. What peaceful stars did he not hang 
amid the shadows of the Patriarch's declining- 
years ! 

And there — right there; and then, just 
then ; the stern, agonizing trial broke and' fell. 
And it came to pass after these things God did 
tempt Abraham.* Pour the right meaning in- 

* £en, xxil, 1, 



104 Present Lessons fro?n Distant Days. 

to that word tempt. " Let no man say, when 
he is tempted, I am tempted of God ; for God 
can not be tempted with evil, neither tempteth 
He any man/'* True, but God does try men, 
He does put men to the test. That is the 
meaning here. And it came to pass after these 
things that God did put Abraham to the test. 
That He did do. That He will do to you and 
me as well. And this was the awful shape 
which Abraham's supreme testing took. " Take 
thou thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou 
lovest."f Do you mark — what else shall I call 
it? — the terrific aggravation of those words: 
Take now thy son — not thy bullocks and thy 
lambs, not thy servant, no, not the steward of 
thine house, that shall not serve the turn ;. 
thine only son — not Ishmael, he is not thy son 
by thine own wife Sarah, he has been started 
on a different destiny, he is not in the line of 
the promises; — -Isaac — yes, he who is the sweet 
Laughter of thy soul — Isaac, whom thou lovest, 
— take him and get thee into the land of Moriah, 
and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one 



James i. 13. f Gen. xxii. 2. 



Difficult Duty. 105 

of the mountains which I will tell thee of.* 
Was there ever sterner test ? Was there ever 
discipline more jagged and more cruel? I am 
sure Abraham must have felt as we have often 
amid the stress of our trials, anything but 
that. Not thus, O Lord, not thus — how often 
do we say it, wither any bloom but this which 
Thy providential blight is striking, touch me 
in any other point than this. But to be tried, 
as I am tried, O Lord, it cuts my heart in twain 
and lets my life flow out ; bruise me if Thou 
must bruise me — but not thus, noc thus. 

And yet one of the wonders of this story is 
the instant obedience which Abraham rendered. 
The Scriptures tell us nothing of the struggle. 
They speak only of the quick action of the 
bleeding but submissive heart. And Abraham 
rose up early in the morning and saddled his 
ass, and took two of his young men with him, 
and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the 
burnt-offering, and rose up and went unto the 
place of which God had told him.f There 
were three days of journeying as brimmed with 



* Gen. xxii. 2. f Gen. xxii. 3. 



106 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

sorrow as days could be. Then at last the fate- 
ful place was nearly reached. Then the young 
men are left, and Abraham goes yonder with his 
boy to do the worship which is to crush out his 
heart. It seems to me that I can see the trem- 
bling of Abraham's hand as he burdens Isaac 
with the wood for the burnt-offering — true type 
of Him who fainted beneath the burden of His 
Own Cross on the Via Dolorosa along the way 
toward Calvary. I think I can see the fearful 
sadness written on that father s face as he goes 
climbing on carrying the fire and the knife. 

When your heart has been filled to bursting, 
and you have felt as though you must lose all 
self-control and lie down and die, have you 
never found your burden made heavier yet by 
some artless, unintending word which some- 
body has spoken at your side ? So I think it 
must have been with Abraham when Isaac so 
unconsciously asked the wondering question: 
My father, behold the fire and the wood ; but 
where is the lamb for the burnt-offering?* 
What could Abraham do ? What can any of 



* Gen. xxii. 7. 



Difficult Duty. 107 

us do when we are utterly desolate, but fall 
back on God. He answered, My son, God will 
provide Himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. 
So they went both of them together. 

Well, the appropriate place is reached. Abra- 
ham builds the altar there. He lays the wood 
in order. He takes his own son Isaac for the 
sacrificial Lamb. He binds him as they used 
to bind the bullocks devoted for an offering. 
He lays him on the altar upon the wood. He 
stretches forth his hand and grasps the knife 
to strike it even into Isaac's heart. O mystery 
of Providence, which could command a thing 
like that ! 

And then — there is the voice of the Angel of 
the Lord calling : Abraham, Abraham ! Here 
am I, is the steady answer; the same reply 
as that when first the testing smote him. O 
Evangel sweet with Heaven's music ; O beauty 
for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning; the gar- 
ment of praise for the spirit of heaviness ; O 
radiant noon breaking upon midnight ; O re- 
ward of faith, whose grappling anchor flukes 
no tempest can wrench away ! " Lay not thine 
hand upon the lad ; neither do thou anything 



108 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

unto him, for now I know that thou fearest 
God, seeing thou has not withheld thy son, 
thine only son, from me."* And then the ram 
caught in the thicket there, close by, in the 
nick of time, for the burnt-offering. And Abra- 
ham's joyful exclamation, Jehovah jireh — the 
Lord will provide. f And then — the blessing, 
brighter, weightier, than even Abraham had ever 
known before — the Oath of Jehovah; By my- 
self have I sworn, that in blessing I will bless 
thee; and in multiplying, I will multiply thy 
seed as the stars of the heaven, as the sand 
upon the sea-shore ; and all the Heaven of 
Peace which filled the tried but faithful soul. 

Such is the Scripture story of this surprising 
and tremendous testing. 

But do you find no difficulty in it, do you 
ask me P Can you make it all clear to yourself 
that God should even seem to command a 
thing like that? 

I reply very frankly, I do find great dif- 
ficulty in it. I can not see white light 
through every part of it. That God should 



* Gen. xxii. 12. -f Gen. xxii. 14. 



Difficult Duty. 109 

even seem to command Abraham to murder his 
own son, even in the way of worship, is, I con- 
fess to you, a difficulty to me. But though I 
can not see through it all, I can see through it 
some ; and what I do see is very close to my 
own life and mightily helpful to me. 

How much it takes to make a grape-cluster 
— long roots striking down into the earth ; 
broad leaves opening a million mouths for light 
and rain and air; branches along which are 
borne, like water from distant fountains along 
aqueducts, the juices, which the roots and 
leaves have manufactured in the darkness be- 
neath, in the light above. But more than this : 
behind the roots and leaves, which can be seen 
and touched, are secrets which science has 
never yet unraveled. How do root and leaf 
elaborate the juices? how is the trunk wrapped 
round each season with its larger covering of 
woody fiber ? what forces lift the sap, in defi- 
ance of gravitation, from the buried rootlet 
way up to the topmost twig ? You know these 
mysteries are present in the grape-vine. You 
can not get your grape-cluster without their, co- 
operation. But you will eat your cluster and 



no Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

thank God for it, though you may not be quite 
able to explain the meaning and the method of 
its growth. 

I have thought it thus with this story of 
Abraham's testing. It is a cluster hanging on 
the Scripture vine. There are some things 
about it very difficult to explain. There are, 
however, other things about it easy of explana- 
tion and full of food for life. I think it wiser 
— is it not ? — to pluck and eat the cluster, and 
wait perhaps for heaven's light to make the dark 
more clear. 

But we may surely answer even now, con- 
cerning the darker side of this story, that it is 
within the category of a great many similar 
mysteries and not outside of them. We can 
not make it quite coincide with our notion of 
the Goodness and the Fatherhood of God that 
He should lay such requirement upon Abra- 
ham. True ; but then the sorrow, misery, death, 
in the world to-day, how can we utterly adjust 
these with the Goodness and the Fatherhood of 
God ? When you go through grave-yards and 
read the legends on the tombstones, the name, 
the birth, the death of a child, for instance ; of 



Difficult Duty. in 

course you think, that is not all the tombstone 
covers — just the one buried there. God knows 
how many hopes were nailed into that coffin 
also ; how some mother's heart wanders on like 
Rachel crying for her children, and can not be 
comforted. You go to the funeral, and say the 
very best words you can ; and yet you know 
they can not reach the bottom of such grief. 
I was in a parlor. once, and saw upon the wall 
a picture of a fair girl, drowned right in the 
beautiful blush of her girlhood ; and the mother, 
they said, had never been the same woman 
since. God could have kept that 'mother's 
heart glad with her daughter. Why did He 
not ? Ah, why ? that is the question. When 
we search for answer, our lips are dumb. In a 
most real sense there often come commands to 
carry our Isaacs into the Mount of Sacrifice. 
There is a mighty sisterhood of mystery which 
this story of Isaac's sacrifice only shares. We 
must wait about a great many things for Heav- 
en's light. 

Then also, I get some help about the matter 
here. In His teaching of men, God always 
stoops to their present point of culture, that 



ii2 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

He may lead them higher. He treats men just 
as parents do children in the nursery. And 
what are we, the topmost of us, but children in 
God's nursery ? The mother seizes such knowl- 
edge as the child has reached already, though 
it be only the fragmentary, disjointed knowl- 
edge of a child, and uses that to build on into 
better. What fairy stories she tells! There 
are no fairies ; but the child's imagination is the 
first faculty that wakes up ; and so the mother 
seizes the fairy tale, and uses it to lead the 
child to fact. I think God treats men in some 
such way. Out of what they already know, out 
of what they already feel, He leads them into 
something better and nobler, through the use 
of the half-knowledge and the dim feeling which 
they have already. 

Now the underlying thought and feeling of 
Abraham was surely right — something which he 
ought to be deeply taught, namely, that every- 
thing, even Isaac, ought to be surrendered to God. 

With the thought of human sacrifices to 
Deity, Abraham was already familiar. They 
practiced it in Chaldea, where he came from. 
They practiced it in all the tribes among whom 



Difficult Duty. 113 

he mingled while he went wandering about the 
promised land. What these did for their hea- 
then gods, surely Abraham ought to be willing 
to do for his, the true God, the Maker of the 
heavens and the earth. So the command comes 
to him in the terms of the circumstances with 
which he is surrounded. He will do for his 
God what the heathen do for theirs. He makes 
the sacrifice in steady and deep intent. Then, 
when it is made, and he has given even Isaac 
up — has not withheld his son, his only son, 
from God — God, by the interposing voice of 
angel, and the provided ram, teaches him that 
He does not delight in human sacrifices ; leads 
him into a better thought and into a better way ; 
blesses him with truer knowledge of the God 
he serves ; tells him that all He desires is that 
He should really stand first and foremost; that 
not even Isaac should get between his soul and 
the heavenly Father's face. This whole thing 
was the descent of God to the then culture of 
Abraham — that he might be lifted into nobler 
thoughts of God than that He should desire 
the blood of his only son. I get some help in 
this way. 

8 



H4 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

But enough of trying to explain the mystery. 
What are the real lessons for,to-day the story 
ought to teach us? 

First. In His training of men, God uses 
Trial. God does not tempt men, the Devil 
does that; but God does try men. 

Did you ever think that the one thing which 
God is after in this world is reality of charac- 
ter — gold, not gilding; diamond, not quartz? 
There is enough of profession in the world. 
There is enough of lip-service. There are 
plenty of fig-trees flaunting forth in leaves, but 
destitute of fruit. But it is not for these that 
God is seeking. They will not do among men 
even in the long run ; they will never do for 
God. A character clear and crystallized about 
the absolute truth of things, this is the noblest 
product of God's hands. It is this which this 
world, with its hardnesses and disciplines, is 
intended, under the hand of God, Xo manu- 
facture. 

But nothing can be real and true except it 
be adjusted to the laws of its being. In a 
green-house some time ago, I saw a noble ba- 
nana-tree full in foliage and blossoming into 



Difficult Duty. fi5 

fruitage ; bat it was in a green-house where the 
proper temperature and the right humidity for 
banana growth were kept. If you would grow 
bananas in this country, you must transplant 
the laws of their growing with them, or you 
kill them, that is all. There is much of egg- 
shell, newspaper, fashionable boarding-school 
culture in these days. But when the strain of 
life comes upon such culture, it smashes it as 
weights egg=shells. You can not have true 
culture except as you adjust training to the 
laws of mind ; except you grasp principles, 
and push backward into causes, and exercise 
the faculties, until the victory of spontaneity is 
won. 

What is true everywhere else is true for char- 
acter. That can only be solid and substantial 
as it is built according to the law ordained for 
it. What now is the supreme law for charac- 
ter ? In a word, this — that God is to be First. 
With Milton, we are to keep ourselves " as ever 
in our Great Task-master's eye. ,, As the plan- 
ets pay obeisance to the central sun, thoughts, 
desires, purposes, affections, are to pay obei- 
sance to the central God. Wealth is real, and 



i it> Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

prosperity is real, and social position is real, 
and friends are real, and children are real ; but 
all -are to be subordinated to the Infinite God, 
most real, most masterful. As Moses did, we 
are to endure " as seeing Him who is invisi- 
ble."* We are not to say, My neighbors stretch 
the truth, and are deft in sleights of underhand- 
edness, and so succeed in business, therefore I 
may do it. We are not to say, The people in 
my* set are liberal, even to wickedness; there- 
fore I may be. We are not to say, That church 
member is no better than he ought to be; 
therefore I may be no better than I ought to 
be. We are not to find our standards down- 
ward, we are to find them upward. More real 
than any thing within us or without us, God 
is to be imperial over thought and deed. 
God first — not tenth, fifth, third, or even sec- 
ond. God first — it is only as you build the 
house of character on such foundation that it 
can stand, though the great winds blow and 
beat, and the great rains fall. This is the law 
for character for you and me. This was its 



* Heb. xi. 27, 



Difficult Duty. 117 

law for Abraham. God roust be more to him 
than Isaac even. 

But it is the seen and the temporal which our 
hands grasp. We are much occupied with the 
visible ; and amid its mists it is often difficult 
to make actual the Invisible. Business en- 
thralls. Friendships enchant. Worldly de- 
lights entice. Insensibly, almost, our hearts 
gather and fasten downward here, instead of 
pushing outward and upward there. We are 
selfish. We are worldly. We are intertwined 
with the seen and temporal. Isaac gets to be 
more than God. 

Then God sets the knives of Trial playing 
among these lower things. Children die. Money 
takes to itself wings and flies away. Influence 
dries up like streams in droughts. We are 
stripped of everything but God. And then, 
like Job amid the potsherds, with only God to 
•look to, God grows strangely real, and the 
sight of God imparts His reality to character. 

In His training of men, God makes use of 
Trial. We must learn to put not Isaac first, but 
God. 

Second. Learn from the story of this Testing 



1 1 8 Present Lessons from Distant Days* 

the true support in Trial. Somebody says : 
** I have known a timid traveler — whose route 
lay across the higher Alps, on a path that, no 
broader than a mule's foothold, skirted a dizzy 
precipice, where we saw the foaming river far 
below diminished to a silver thread — find it 
safest to shut her eyes, nor attempt to guide 
the course, or touch the bridle, where a touch 
were fatal, throwing the steed and rider over 
to bound from shelf to shelf and be dashed to 
pieces in the valley below. And there are 
times and circumstances when, to be saved 
from falling into sinful doubts, and even into 
blank despair, the believer must, if we may say 
so, shut his eyes, and committing his way to 
God, let the bridle lie on the neck of Provi- 
dence, and walk not by sight, but faith. God, 
however things may look, has not forgotten to 
be gracious, nor is His mercy clean gone for- 
ever; and when we are walking in darkness 
and have no light, there is nothing for it but 
6 to trust in the Lord and stay ourselves on 
God.' " 

If you will turn to the eleventh chapter of 
the Epistle to the Hebrews, you will find that 



Difficult Duty. 119 

it was just this deathless, sightless trust in God 
which did hold Abraham steady amid this ter- 
rific testing. " By faith, Abraham, when he was 
tried, offered up Isaac ; and he that had re- 
ceived the promises offered up his only begot- 
ten son, of whom it was said that in Isaac shall 
thy seed be called; accounting that God was 
able to raise him up even from the dead.* 

My friend, when there is no Mount Moriah 
in your vision ; when the way of life is smooth 
and does not go climbing up some rocky height 
of sacrifice ; when you may dwell in quietness 
within your tent and have all the hours filled 
so shiningly with the music of Isaac's laughter 
— then you may not be so much affronted with 
the creed of those who tell you that after all 
the world is only a machine, and God is only a 
great machinist, who, having manufactured the 
concern and wound it up, has flung it off into 
the spaces with a carelessness that is infinite, to 
let it run on until it shall run down. 

But when those awful Moriah summits do 
rise before you, as at some time or other they 



* Heb. xi. 17, 18, 19. 



1 20 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

surely will, those heights upon which you must 
build your altar, on which you must lay in ded- 
ication utter your heart's best treasure; O, 
then, how your heart will go pushing outward, 
upward, to grasp and keep the fact and feeling 
of a Close, Personal, Interfering, Almighty God. 
Faith in Him is the only thing which can keep 
you steady then. Faith in Him as the only one • 
who can change the mount of Sacrifice into the 
mount Jehovah Jireh — the Lord will provide. 

Third. Learn from the Scripture story of 
this Testing the truth, that Trial nobly borne is 
only a rough, but needful way into better bless- 
ing. Now no chastening for the present seem- 
eth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless, 
afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of 
righteousness unto them which are exercised 
thereby.* O that Afterward — how it is the 
harvest set upon the land which the plough has 
cut to pieces; how it is the harbor into which 
we sail when the buffeting waves have been 
overpast. Afterward — for Abraham what truer 
knowledge of Jehovah; what confirmation of 



* Heb. xii. 11. 



Difficult Duty. 121 

the promises even by the oath of God ; what 
joy, receiving Isaac back from the dead even 
in a figure; what lifted faith in Him who now 
had thus become to him Jehovah Jireh — the 
Rescuing, the Providing God. 

There was Perpetua. She was young; she 
was delicate ; she was a mother. " Have mercy 
on thy babe," they said to her. " Have mercy on 
the white hairs of thy father and the infancy 
of thy child.'' " I will not," she answered. "Art 
thou, then, a Christian?" they said; and she 
answered, "Yes." "Then sentence was pro- 
nounced, and we were condemned to the wild 
beasts, and with hearts full of joy returned to 
our prison," she says. Condemned to the wild 
beasts, and with hearts full of joy returned to 
our prison. Jehovah Jireh — the Lord will pro- 
vide. If thou must really make the sacrifice, 
if thou must meet the savage beasts, while the 
thronging amphitheatre looks down applauding, 
then as thy day is shall thy strength be ; there 
shall come to thee from God such surprising 
inner help that the beasts shall be but the 
rougher messengers opening the gates of thy 
reward. 



122 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

I was reading lately of that young British 
soldier who told the chaplain-general of the 
British forces, that when on his first night in 
the barracks he knelt down to say his prayers, 
the others all laughed at him and flung their 
boots at him. The chaplain advised him to 
say his prayers in bed. Next time the chap- 
lain met the soldier he asked him how his plan 
succeeded. "I did it for a night or two," the 
man replied, "but then I thought it looked like 
being ashamed of Jesus Christ ; and I knelt 
down again to say my prayers by my bed, but 
none of the others laugh at me now. On the 
contrary, they kneel down themselves and say 
their own prayers." Jehovah Jireh — the Lord 
will provide. If thou art but true to God amid 
thy testing, He will make thy crosses blossom 
for thee into victorious crowns. Difficult duty 
— the way out ? This is the way out — namely, 
the way in — trusting to the certain help of God 
to lead thee along that way, out into a larger 
place. 

What Abraham need not do — that, con- 
strained by surpassing love — our God has done. 
"For God so loved the world that He gave His 



Difficult Duty. 123 

only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in 
Him should not perish, but have everlasting 
life." 

Must not His sacrifice, not stopping in in- 
tent, but moving from intent outward even to 
the nails^and cry and gash of spear of Calvary, 
melt your heart into penitence and faith and 
love? 



CHAPTER VI. 

MARRIAGE AND HOME. 
Genesis xxiv. 67. 

THE twenty-fourth chapter of the Genesis, 
says a German commentator, " glows in 
all the freshness and fullness of a sacred Bibli- 
cal idyl — the first pearl in that string of pearls, 
in the religious glorification of the human brid- 
al state, which runs down through the wooing 
of Rachel by Jacob, the little book of Ruth, 
to its culmination in the Song of Songs. "* 
Certainly the chapter is a most sweet and pre- 
cious primaeval picture. Nowhere else can you 
find a story more touching and more tender, and 
at the same time more exquisite in its literary 
finish. It is very full, too, of religious and wise 
suggestion about a subject very close to every 



* Lange's Commentary. 
(124) 



Marriage and Home. 125 

one of us — marriage and home. For, much as 
the world has grown since that most ancient 
time when Abraham sent Eliezer on the long 
journey after a wife for his son Isaac, it has 
not outgrown the union of hearts and lives in 
marriage and the home which comes out of it. 

But, before we go forward to thought about 
this special subject, I would like to have you 
notice another thing about this chapter in ad- 
dition to the still, soft beauty of it. 

Bishop Watson tells us : " An authentic book 
is that which relates matters of fact as they 
really happened." Now the Bible is such an au- 
thentic book. What it tells you it tells truly, 
according to the facts. Its history is a real 
history. And the argument for the truth of 
the whole Bible, from its authenticity, is a 
very strong one — an argument which all the 
researches in Eastern lands are constantly 
making stronger still. The argument is this : 
if the Bible is so authentic, so close to facts in 
matters of historical detail ; if it can be so ut- 
terly trusted here, if all research only increases 
the reason for our trust in it here, certainly we 
have right to trust it in all its parts : certainly 



126 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

so true in these matters, it must be as true in 
other matters. 

That it may be seen how authentic, and so 
how true, the Bible is in this chapter, I would 
like to quote you a passage from the u Land 
and the Book," by Mr. Thompson. Mr. 
Thompson has been very long a resident in 
the Holy Land, and in that country fashions 
and customs do not change. They are some- 
thing fastened, remaining, stereotyped. 

Mr. Thompson says, talking about this very 
chapter : " The preparation and outfit for this 
journey agree in all respects with the persons 
concerned, the nature of the country, and the 
habits of the people. Eliezer took the camels 
loaded with provisions and presents; and such 
an expedition would not now be undertaken 
from Hebron with any other animals, nor with 
less number. Such a journey is both long and 
dangerous, far beyond what is indicated to a 
Western reader by the brief statement that 
Eliezer arose and went into Mesopotamia." 

" Every phrase of the eleventh verse contains 
an allusion to matters Oriental. Arrived at 
the town of Nahor, he made his camels kneel 



Marriage and Home. 127 

down without the city by a well of water, at 
the time of evening — the time that women go 
out to draw water. He made the camels kneel 
— a mode of expression taken from actual life. 
The action is literally kneeling; not stooping, 
sitting, or lying down on the side, like a horse, 
but kneeling on his knees ; and this the camel is 
taught to do from his youth. The place is said 
to have been by a well of water, and this well 
was outside the city. In the East, where wells 
are scarce, and water indispensable, the exist- 
ence of a well or fountain determines the site 
of a viUage. The people build near it, but pre- 
fer to have it outside the city, to avoid the 
noise, dust, and confusion always occurring at 
it, and especially if the place is on the public 
highway. It is around the fountain that the 
thirsty traveler and the wearied caravan assem- 
ble ; and if you have become separated from 
your own company, before arriving at a town, 
you need only inquire for the fountain, and 
there you will find them." 

"The time was evening; but it is further 
stated that it was when the women go forth to 
draw water. True to life again. At that hour 



128 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

the peasant returns home from his labor, and 
the women are busy preparing the evening meal, 
which is to be ready at sunset. Cool fresh 
water is then demanded, and, of course, there 
is a great concourse about the well. But why 
limit it to the women ? Simply because such is 
the fact. About great cities men often carry 
w r ater, both on donkeys and on their own backs ; 
but in the country, women only go to the well 
or fountain ; and often, when traveling, have I 
seen long files of them going and returning 
with their pitchers, 'at the time when women 
go out to draw water.' " 

"The description of Rebekah, the account 
she gives of herself, and the whole dialogue 
with Eliezer, agree admirably with Oriental 
customs. Even the statement as to the man- 
ner of carrying her pitcher, or rather jar, is 
exact — on her shoulder. The Egyptian and 
the Negro carry on the head ; the Syrian on 
the shoulder or the hip. She went down to 
the well ; and nearly all the wells in the East 
are in wadies (valleys), and many of them have 
steps down to the water. Eliezer asks water 
to drink ; she hastens and lets down the pitcher 



Marriage and Home. 129 

on her band. How often have I had this iden- 
tical act performed for myself, when travel- 
ing in this thirsty land. Rebekah emptied her 
pitcher into the trough — an article always found 
about wells, and frequently made of stone. 
The jewels also for the face, forehead, and 
arms are still as popular among the same class 
of people as they were in the days of Abra- 
ham. The camels, as appears from the thirty- 
second verse, were brought into the house, and 
I have often slept in the same room with these 
peaceful animals. Finally, the behavior of Re- 
bekah, when about to meet Isaac, was such as 
modern etiquette requires. It is customary for 
both men and women, when an Emeer, or great 
personage is approaching, to alight some time 
before he comes up with them. In a word, 
this Biblical narrative is so natural to one fa- 
miliar with the East, so beautiful also and life- 
like, that the entire scene seems to be an affair 
in which he himself has but recently been an 
actor." * 

So you see how authentic the Bible is — how 



* " The Land and the Book," Vol. 2, pages 403-406. 
9 



130 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

true about even such slight matters. Certainly 
the argument is a strong and concluding one ; 
if so true in such touches and details, then true 
in all, and true throughout. 

It is, however, of Marriage and of an opening 
Home of which this chapter tells. It is about 
these our .thoughts must mainly gather. Let us 
look together into this Scripture and listen for 
a little to its beneficent suggestions about such 
important facts of life. 

This is the first suggestion : Here was a mar- 
riage consummated under the full and hearty 
sanction of the parents on both sides. 

I think it very touching to read how anxious 
Abraham was for the welfare of his son in his 
marriage. I am sure the relation between Isaac 
and his mother Sarah must have been very ten- 
der, very close, and absorbing. He had been 
the child of her old age, when she had given 
up the hope of ever having any child. It was 
Isaac who had cleaned from her the reproach 
which all Oriental women very keenly feel 
when they are denied children. Then, too, 
Isaac was in the line of God's promise, and 
was substantial proof that God would keep His 



Marriage and Home. 131 

promise to the last letter, however improbable it 
might seem that the promise could come true. 
Then, too, what mother's hopes and mother's 
pride gathered round and centered in that boy ! 
How he was to carry on the family until it 
widened into a mighty nation. How through 
him and through his descendants the promised 
blessing was at last to shine upon the earth. 
Certainly Isaac was very sweet and satisfying 
Laughter to his mother's heart. Certainly her 
love brooded him, as on quiet summer nights 
the dew gently broods the thirsty flowers. And 
Isaac answered to all this mother's love and 
care so utterly, that for long years, as far as we 
can find out, he never thought of marriage. It 
was enough for him that he had his mother. 

But Sarah had been dead now for something 
like three years. The death-shadow came into 
Abraham's tent at last, just as it will surely 
come into your home and mine. Sarah lived 
a hundred and twenty-seven years; but the 
longest day gets to its sun-setting. And Abra- 
ham bought the cave of Machpelah for a tomb 
in which to lay his dead. This chapter closes 
with a very pathetic sentence: "And Isaac 



132 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

was comforted after his mother's death." Re- 
bekah began to take a little the mother's place. 
The three years' steady mourning began to dry 
its tears somewhat, now that Rebekah had ap- 
peared. Isaac was a quiet, clinging, tenacious 
sort of man. He was disposed to melan- 
choly. His mother's death had gathered con- 
stant shadows round him. It was Abraham 
who proposed and dispatched the embassy for 
a wife for Isaac. And we may be sure that 
Abraham warmly welcomed Rebekah when she 
came, and rejoiced when the shadows began to 
roll away from his son's heart in the sunshine 
of her presence. 

And if w r e turn to Rebekah' s side of the 
house, we find that the welcome to this mar- 
riage was just as cordial there. "And they 
sent away Rebekah their sister, and her nurse, 
and Abraham's servant, and his men. And 
they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, Thou 
art our sister ; be thou the mother of thousands 
of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate 
of those which hate th^m."* 



Gen. xxiv. 59. 



Marriage and Home. 133 

Now certainly all this was as it ought to be. 
When two young hearts, standing in equal 
pledge, put their feet upon the threshold open- 
ing into their united life, it is certainly better, 
it is certainly the thing that ought to be, that 
they be garlanded by the sympathy and over- 
shadowed by the benediction of the parents' 
hearts and hands. 

Sometimes, I grant, the marriage must begin 
without such sanction; I will affirm that the 
sacredest thing in this wide world, more sacred 
even that a parent's sanction, is the discovery 
and union in each other and to each other of 
two loving hearts. Sometimes there are cross- 
grained and unwise parents, who, for no reason 
except that he or she is not rich enough, or not 
in high position enough, refuse their sanction, 
and seek to interfere with the wise selections 
of a holy love. Well, then, the only thing for 
true hearts to do, is in God's name to stand 
true : and at the right age, and with wise fore- 
cast, an 9] with sufficient certainty of their own 
feelings through tests of time, and with deep 
trust in God, to pass out into life together even 
under such a shadow as that of a withheld 



134 Present Lessons front Distant Days. 

parental sanction. But I am very thoroughly 
persuaded that while such instances are com- 
mon enough in novels, they are very uncommon 
in actual life- 

I grant again, that sometimes a marriage 
must begin without such parental sanction, be- 
cause such sanction ought to be resolutely 
withheld. Parents are wiser than their chil- 
dren, usually ; they have lived longer. If the 
child of your love — whether it be boy or girl — 
is determined on alliance with worthlessness, 
with a mere and miserable prettiness, with bad 
and dissipated habits, with utter irreligion, 
then you ought as parents, as far as possible, to 
withhold your sanction and interfere. And 
any young man or young woman, blessed with 
a good father and a good mother, who is con- 
scious that the parental blessing must be with- 
held because of such reasons as I have men- 
tioned, had better take counsel of wiser heads 
and of older and stronger hearts, and beware, 
and refuse to get clasped into such a marriage. 
The refusal of the parents' sanction to such a 
marriage ought to be the voice of God against 
it. For the immense preponderance of proba- 



Marriage and Home. 135 

bilities, the almost certainty, is that such a mar- 
riage will be a sowing to the wind and the 
reaping of the whirlwind. O the harbor which 
a true marriage opens; it is home — that word 
of all we speak which is likest heaven. O the 
wreck which a false marriage causes the life ; 
it is wreck the most utter, the most desperate, 
the most remediless. And if, young man, young 
woman, the parental heart — because of evil 
habits, looseness of life, want of moral earnest- 
ness, a mere glitter of external and superficial 
grace or pleasantness — warn you lovingly of 
such a wreck, be advised in time, stop ; make 
no such marriage as that must be. . 

Other things being equal, that is the mar- 
riage which holds the best promise of the 
blessed life which starts one with the fairest 
measure of the heartiest parental sanction. 
It is such sanction which young people should 
in the deepest way desire. 

There is still another thing I want to say 
just here : I am sure the mightiest safety which 
can stand about young people, when at last the 
day comes, and they must make for themselves 
this most momentous choice of marriage, I am 



136 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

sure that the thickest- walled safety which can 
be built around them for such a time, is such 
a method of parental training that, at that bal- 
ancing critical time, children shall stand in the 
true and right relation to their parents. 

I was rejoicing some time since with a young 
father and mother over the babe that God had 
given them. What a little thing it was ; and 
yet they said — and I have no doubt that what 
they said is true — it was a babe most wonder- 
ful. What now is the relation in which that 
baby wonder begins to stand toward parent- 
hood ? Why, it stands utterly and thoroughly 
in the relation of dependence. It is altogether 
in that relation. It hangs for everything upon 
parenthood ; and that relation shall maintain 
itself for a long time as the years go on. As 
the little creature climbs up into higher and 
broadens out into wider life, it must still do it in 
this relation of dependence. Feeling, thought, 
culture of every sort, must come to it largely 
through parental ministry. It shall get its idea 
of God as it thinks of Him under the image of 
the greater Parent. It shall find edge for its 
conscience as it sees the discrimination of the 



Marriage and Home, 137 

parent between right and wrong. It shall learn 
the meaning of law and of subjection as it pays 
obedience to the parents' will. For a long time 
to that child the parents must stand for every- 
thing. 

But, you know that the fruit grows looser 
upon the stem as it gets on toward ripening. 
By and by another relation shall begin to ob- 
trude upon and usurp this relation of depend- 
ence — namely, the relation of independence. 
The child begins to think for itself, reason for 
itself, judge for itself. There rises within itself 
the consciousness of its own free personality. 
It begins more and more to assert itself, and it 
ought to. It is God's law. The child gathers 
the reins of authority from the hands of the 
parent, takes them into its own, and begins to 
guide and manage its life for itself. 

Now, just here, as it seems to me, is the crit- 
ical time and passage for parental training. I 
have known parents who were caught in vast 
surprise when there came this inevitable period 
in their child's development. They could not 
understand it. They would not have it so. 
They screwed yet harder down the clamps of 



138 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

their authority.. And what was the conse- 
quence? The child openly rebelled and the 
happy home-life was broken up. Or, if not 
that, while there might be an outward submis- 
sion to authority, there was an inward hatred 
of it and a practice against it when the parent's 
back was turned ; and so there was given to 
the young nature the twist of a bad deceit and 
the evil sound of hollowness. The parent now, 
at this awful but necessary turn in the child's 
life, had but one hand to extend to it — the hand 
of authority. There ought to have been an- 
other hand stretched out — the hand of com- 
panionship. For blessed as is the relation of 
the dependence of childhood upon parenthood 
— the sign of which is authority — more blessed 
is the relation of a self-centered, self-controlling, 
noble independence toward parenthood — the 
sign of which is companionship. 

O if at this time in the child's development, 
when questions must be decided for itself, when 
the voice of its own conscience must be heard, 
when it must feel the weight of moral respon^ 
sibilities pressing upon the shoulders of its 
own fully formed personality; when it for itself 



Marriage and Home* 139 

must choose its way, and no longer may follow 
in the way appointed by another ; O if then 
the parent be only ready to recognize the real 
and changed relation of the child; if the voice 
of command do but take to itself the tone of 
a loving and wise advice; if there widen no 
dreary chasm between the child's heart and the 
parent's heart ; if the child but feel itself wrap- 
ped about by the atmosphere of a warm, so- 
liciting, tender, interpreting companionship ; — 
then with what triple safety is that child guard- 
ed ; then, how into the parent's ear will be 
whispered confidingly its shyest and most se- 
cret thoughts ; then, when thoughts of marriage 
begin to stir, as stir they surely will, and the 
young heart knows not if it be not caught by 
some other young heart which seems to mate 
it : then at this time, filled with tremulous 
delight, and yet misty with the shadows of 
great danger, — how will there be no conceal- 
ment, no mean and miserable management, no 
deceiving silences and conscience-damaging 
denials ; but how, yearningly and frankly, will 
the dear advice of the companion parent be 
sought and listened to and heeded, and how 



140 Present Lessons f7-om Distant Days. 

immensely unlikely will it be that that child 
will stand upon a marriage threshold which 
may not be festooned and wreathed around, 
and with the most fragrant and blooming pa- 
rental sanction. 

I think that a most beautiful picture in this 
chapter, Isaac and Rebekah going to each other, 
under the utmost blessing of the homes they 
leave to make their own. God grant it may 
be yours, young people, to have it when you 
marry. God grant it may be ours, who are 
parents, to giv^ it when our children go. 

But will you be kind enough to listen to a 
second suggestion concerning marriage, speak- 
ing to us out of this chapter. Here was a 
marriage promising blessing, because of the 
characters of those entering it. 

That was the wisest possible prayer which 
Eliezer lifted heavenward, standing there by 
the well, outside the city of Nahor, and be- 
seeching God's blessing on his embassy. " And 
he said : O Lord God of my master Abraham, 
I pray thee send me good speed this day, and 
shew kindness unto my master Abraham. Be- 
hold I stand here by the well of water ; and 



Marriage and Home. 141 

the daughters of the men of the city come out 
to draw water. And let it come to pass that 
the damsel to whom I shall say, Let down thy 
pitcher, I pray thee, that I may drink ; and she 
shall say, Drink, and I will give thy camels 
drink also ; let the same be she that thou hast 
appointed for thy servant Isaac."* That was 
the wisest possible prayer. A maiden answer- 
ing a test like that would surely be the help- 
fulest, noblest of wives. 

For see — she must be a strong and healthful 
maiden to do a thing like that. Camels are 
enormous drinkers, and she had to go down to 
the well — down steps probably, and bear up 
the heavy water-jar upon her shoulder — and 
she must do it again and again until she had 
satisfied the thirst of the camels. She was no 
maiden whom a breath of air would smite ; 
whom a slight walk would weary; who must 
be waited on as though she were a helpless 
infant; who was not good for much except to 
display the jewels which Eliezer gave her. She 
was a strong, grand damsel, with the full pulses 



* Gen. xxiv. 12-14. 



142 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

of a high health — able to do, able to lay her 
hands to things. 

See again : She was of a generous and 
obliging disposition. Mr. Thompson, in his 
" Land and the Book," says : " I have never 
found any young lady so generous as this fair 
daughter of Bethuel. She drew for all Eliezer's 
camels, and for nothing, while I have often 
found it difficult to get my horse watered even 
for money.' ' I think these touches, telling of 
her quick adjustment to this unknown test, 
wonderfully beautiful, and evidence of a char- 
acter as beautiful. How courteous she was to 
the stranger standing there : u Drink, my 
lord ! " How gracious she was : " And she 
hasted and let down her pitcher upon her 
hand and gave him drink." How spontaneous 
she was in her readiness to serve : " I will 
draw water for thy camels, until they have 
done drinking.' ' How eager she was, and how 
kind-hearted, pitying the thirsty camels after 
their long march : " And she hasted and 
emptied her pitcher into the trough, and ran 
again unto the well to draw water, and drew 
for all his camels." 



Marriage and Home. 143 

"And she was very fair to look upon," the 
record says. I do not wonder. I am sure so 
beautiful a nature must have fashioned a beau- 
tiful face. 

One of the old Anglo-Saxon translations of 
the Bible calls the husband the weapon-man 
and the wife the web-man. He defends and 
supplies ; she weaves in the home. Ah, yes ! 
and she weaves the home itself as well. Home 
is most what she makes it. And I am sure it 
is easy enough to see that such politeness and 
courtesy and generosity and obligingness and 
sweet, swift readiness for service as Rebekah 
manifested here, must have been very radiant 
colors to get woven into Isaac's home. 

Then, besides, she came of a religious family, 
that is, of as religious a family as there was 
then in the world, save Abraham's. Abraham's 
kinsmen there m Nahor, knew something at 
least of God. At any rate, they knew a great 
deal more of Him than did the daughters of 
the Canaanitesj among whom Abraham dwelt. 
It was the chief thing which Abraham made 
Eliezer promise, that Isaac should not have 
one of these for wife. So I think it fair to say 



144 -Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

that Rebekah shared with Isaac similarity of 
religious sentiment. She was not against him 
in this regard ; she was with him. She had had, 
in a certain sense at least, religious training. 
Her character had not been formed upon the 
heathen model. Well, now, that was a very 
beautiful character, bating soriie faults — of 
course Rebekah had faults, everybody has — 
that was a very beautiful character to build a 
home with — such vigorous health, such winning 
courtesy and readiness to serve, such mating 
of religious sentiment and feeling. So much 
for Rebekah. Only I would like to say also, 
I like that decision in her character. You 
will remember that after Eliezer had been ac- 
cepted in his quest, and it was all settled that 
Rebekah was to be Isaac's wife, that her family 
wanted her to stay at least ten days longer with 
them. But Eliezer said : " Hinder me not, 
seeing the Lord hath prospered me. And they 
said, We will call the damsel, and inquire at her 
mouth. And they called Rebekah, and said un- 
to her, Wilt thou go with this man? And she 
said, I will go." It was a grand immediate giv- 
ing of herself at once to him who was to be 



Marriage and Home. 145 

her husband. There was no little fluttering 
unmeaning hesitancy, as though she did not 
know her mind. She knew it, and was ready 
for that which her decision might bring to her. 
It was a very strong character, that of Re- 
bekah's, in addition, or perhaps better under- 
neath its other graces. She was a woman you 
could count on. Thus Rebekah. And as to 
Isaac? We do not know so much of him in 
his younger years. But a young man who 
could love his mother so must have possessed 
very engaging qualities. And this also we 
know of him : he was pure, he was religious. 

And what have I been going through all this 
for? For this reason, that you might the more 
clearly see the principle underlying it all ; 
namely, that it is the man and woman of the 
best and highest character who promise best 
for a happy marriage and a happy home. True 
words these which some one else has spoken : 
" The truest wedded life can only come out of 
the truest unwedded life. It is blank folly to 
imagine that a woman who has had half a dozen 
affairs of the heart, as they are called, can wed 
a man who has sown his wild oats, and make a 
10 



146 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

happy match of it. ' Who shall ascend into 
the hill of the Lord ? Who shall abide in His 
holy place? He that hath clean hands and a 
pure heart, who hath not lifted up his soul un- 
to vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.' You say, 
that means the merchant, and the politician, 
and the man and woman who would experience 
religion in the purest and loftiest sense. I say 
it means fitness for a true wedding, as certain- 
ly as any other thing we can think of. There 
is no reach in our life in which these great first 
things can be more essential, either for this 
world or the world to come. You can say it is 
seeing life. I say, it is seeing death. It is 
building a closet to hold a skeleton in the Holy 
of Holies."* The best and truest characters 
make the truest marriage. It is for the man 
and woman, true as Rebekah was, and true as 
Isaac was before marriage, who shall enter into 
God's best blessing of a happy home. 

Will you receive a third suggestion, speak- 
ing to us out of this chapter, possibly a little 
anticipated in what I have just been saying? 



* Robert Coilyer. 



Marriage and Home. 147 

Here was a marriage, and so a home, founded 
in religion. 

I think it wonderful to notice how the whole 
building of this new home was wrapped about 
by prayer. It was in the most prayerful and 
religious spirit that Abraham determined on 
the sending of the embassy to bring a wife for 
his son Isaac. 

Can you think of a more touching picture 
than that of the faithful old servant, Eliezer, 
standing there by the well's mouth, and not 
depending on his own skill and fmesse l but 
first and foremost upon God, lifting up his 
heart there heavenward, that he might be led 
to her whom a Thou hast appointed for Thy 
servant Isaac." 

And then the blessing which Rebekah car- 
ried with her from her family was a prayer. 
And then that is a most beautiful and tender 
touch concerning Isaac, He first meets his 
wife amid his prayers. " And Isaac went out 
to meditate in the field at the even-tide; and 
he lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, the 
camels were coming. And Rebekah lifted up 
her eyes ; and when she saw Isaac, she lighted 



148 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

off the camel. And the servant said, It is my 
master : therefore she took a veil, and covered 
herself. And the servant told Isaac all things 
that he had done. And Isaac brought her in- 
to his mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebekah, 
and she became his wife ; and he loved her: 
and Isaac was comforted after his mother's 
death."* 

Dear young people, make your marriages as 
well in the presence of the Throne. Seek you 
there the leading of His Spirit, that you may 
find the one whom God hath appointed for His 
servant. Having found, bind your hearts to- 
gether more closely still by the bond of prayer. 
And when you stand together on life's thres- 
hold, and enter your home together, kneel 
there in prayer together. Ask God to dwell in 
you by His Spirit for Jesus' sake. A*sk Him 
to keep you in your love, in your joys, in your 
burdens. 

Keep that prayer-altar lifted. Forget it not ; 
neglect it not You may front any future thus. 
And all the joys of life, and all its trials too, 



* Gen. xxiv. 63-67. 



Marriage and Home* 149 

shall but lead you into deeper, truer, more ac- 
cordant marriage. And it shall surely some- 
times seem to you as though a fragment of 
Heaven's glory had fallen down and broken 
shiningly upon your heads. 

And, older people, you who are already mar- 
ried, and have possibly neglected hitherto to 
build your marriage and your home in prayer, 
begin now to do it. Even as did Lazarus, and 
Martha, and Mary there in Bethany, open your 
hearts and homes for the Lord's entrance. He 
will come. He will tarry with you. He will 
bring with Him better blessings for you than 
you have ever dreamed, as He did for them. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE END. 

<< A ND all the days that Adam lived were 
-£^- nine hundred and. thirty years; and he 
died. And all the days of Seth were nine hun- 
dred and twelve years ; and he died. And all 
the days of Enos were nine hundred and five 
years ; and he died. And all the days of Cai- 
nan were nine hundred and ten years; and he 
died. And all the days of Mahalaleel were eight 
hundred ninety and five years; and he died. 
And all the days of Jared ,were nine hundred 
sixty and two years ; and he died. And all 
the days of Methuselah were nine hundred 
sixty and nine years; and he died. And all 
the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty 
years ; and he died. " * "And these are the days 
of the years of Abraham's life which he lived, 



* Gen. v. 

(150) 



The End. 151 

an hundred threescore and fifteen years. -Then 
Abraham gave up the ghost, and he died."* 

And so the end came at last, and certainly, 
even to those who tarried in the earth nearly a 
thousand years — even to Abraham, who waited 
here nearly two hundred, the end came. 

You will have noticed that, long as his life 
was, the end smote Abraham much sooner than 
it did the group of patriarchs who lived before 
him. 

It will smite you and me how swiftly sooner. 
There is between ourselves and these most 
ancient men, a similarity and a difference. The 
similarity — that as certainly as the End hove 
in sight for them, so certainly will it for you 
and me. The difference — that, at the very 
longest, our lives can be but as a handbreadth 
compared with theirs. 

I have read somewhere that Professor Fara- 
day adopted Flourins' physiological theory, that 
the natural age of man is one hundred years. 
The durability of man he believed to be meas- 
ured by the time of growth. When once the 



* Gen. xxv. 7. 



152 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

bone, and that portion of the bone separated 
from the main portion of it by cartilage, be- 
come united, the body grows no more, in 
man this union is effected at twenty years. In 
the camel it takes place at eight ; in the horse 
at five; in the lion at four; in the dog at two ; 
in the rabbit at one. The natural termination 
of life is five removes from these several points. 
Man, being twenty years in growing, lives five 
times twenty years, that is one hundred ; the 
camel is eight years in growing, and lives five 
times eight, that is forty years. The horse is 
five years growing, and he lives twenty-five 
years. The man who does not die of sickness, 
lives everywhere from eighty to one hundred 
years. Providence has given to man a century 
of life, but he does not attain it because he in- 
herits disease; eats unwholesome food and 
permits vexations to disturb his equipoise. Life 
is to be divided into two equal halves, growth 
and decline ; and these halves are to be again 
divided into infancy, youth, virility, and age. 
Infancy extends to the twentieth year; growth 
to the fiftieth, because it is during this period 
that the tissues become firm ; virility from fifty 



The End. 153 

to seventy-five, during which the organism re- 
mains complete, and at seventy-five old age 
commences, to last a longer or a shorter time, 
as the diminution of reserved forces is hastened 
or retarded. 

Such may be an ideal statement of the proper 
length of human life ; but it is not a practical 
one. 

Here is a practical statement furnished us by 
Bishop Burgess : " Ten thousand human beings 
set forth together on their journey. After ten 
years one-third at least have disappeared. At 
the middle point of the common measures of 
life, but half are still upon the road. Faster 
and faster, as the ranks grow thinner, they that 
remain till now become weary, and lie down 
and rise no more. At threescore and ten a 
band of some four hundred — nine thousand 
six hundred out of the ten thousand have de- 
parted — yet struggle on. At ninety, these have 
been reduced to a handful of thirty trembling 
patriarchs. Year after year they fall in dimin- 
ishing numbers. One lingers perhaps, a lonely 
marvel, till the century is over. We look again, 
and the work of death is finished." 



154 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

That is a statement nearer to the actual truth 
of things. The chances are against us. It is 
much more probable that we shall not, than 
that we shall, reach the psalmist's limit for life, 
of threescore years and ten. 

This also is very real. Compared with his 
space of life, a year might seem a very small 
matter to Methusaleh, or even to Abraham ; 
but compared with our space, it is certainly a 
very great matter. It is a very large reef furled 
in the sail of life ; and that is the apostle's fig- 
ure when he wrote to the Corinthians : ''Breth- 
ren, the time is short" — more literally, " Breth- 
ren, the time is reefed." A thirsty fly once 
perched upon a poet's cup, and thus he sung 
to it: 

Both alike are mine and thine, 
Hastening quick to their decline : 
Thine's a summer, mine no more, 
Though repeated to threescore ; 
Threescore summers, when they're gone, 
Will appear as short as one. 

" Oh, eloquent, just, and mighty death ! " ex- 
claims Sir Walter Raleigh, " whom none could 
advise, thou hast persuaded ; and whom all the 



The End. 155 

world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out 
of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn 
together all the far -stretched greatness, all 
the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and 
covered it all over with these two narrow 
words, hie jacet" — here it lies. 

But that the End is sure to come, and that it 
is sure to come quickly to us, is not the great- 
est matter. This rather is the immensely 
greatest matter, with what sort of a life shall 
that End find us ? All of us must die at last, 
like Abraham. Would God we could all of us 
meet the End, having lived like Abraham. 
And that is possible. 

Consider a moment Abraham's place in his- 
tory. " The homage of numberless generations 
has elevated the Hebrew exile of Ur almost into 
a divinity." To be but in lineal descent from 
him has been the chosen pride of a select peo- 
ple for four thousand years. To be in Abraham's 
bosom became the synonym for Paradise ; and 
the devout Jew could not tell in better words 
the glories of the future state. Paul laid chief 
stress on faith; James laid much stress on 
works . Some have said they were in opposition ; 



156 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

yet both hold up Abraham as a shining pattern 
for the early Christians. If you ask the Mussul- 
man whom he honors most, he will say to you 
that next to Mohammed, Abraham was God's 
greatest prophet. Dean Stanley will tell you 
that when the Roman Emperor, Alexander 
Severus, would place in the chapel of his palace 
the statues of the choice spirits of all time, 
that, looking on them, he might be quickened 
and inspired, it was Abraham's statue, rather 
than that of Moses, he lifted there. The truth 
is that no human scepter has ever been so 
powerful over the hearts of men as has been 
the spell which this Hebrew pilgrim flung. 
Through all the ages, no higher place in his- 
tory has been reached by any man than by this 
Abraham. 

And what I would have you specially notice 
is, that Abraham has reached his place in 
other than the usual ways in which great 
characters have won their greatness. 

Abraham was the leader of a historic emi- 
gration. Other men have been. You and I 
can not be. But it was not thus that Abraham 
won his greatness. 



The End. 157 

Abraham was the victorious captain of fight- 
ing followers. Other men have been. It is 
not probable that you or I will be. But it is 
not thus that Abraham won his greatness. 

Abraham was a prosperous man in the v r ay 
of worldly wealth. Other men have been such. 
It is possible that some of you may be such. 
But it was not thus that Abraham won his 
greatness. 

Abraham was the distinct and chosen ances- 
tor of nations. Other men have been. You 
and I will not be. But it was not thus that 
Abraham won his greatness. 

Not thus— and I would have you particularly 
look at this. The way into Abraham's pre- 
eminence was along the way of a lifted re- 
ligious character. The greatness of Abraham 
is a distinction in moral qualities. This is 
what I would like to lodge chiefly in your 
thought — that Abraham stands in such place 
because of the possession of altogether imitable 
qualities. For moral qualities are qualities 
imitable all time through and all the world 
over. " It was simply the purity and nobility 
of his personal piety that made Abraham what 



158 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

he is;"* And while a man may not have 
genius or high birth, or stimulating surround- 
ing?, or chance and power of command, or 
wealth, he may have a grand and controlling 
personal piety. I do not say that he will thus 
achieve the fame of Abraham — that generation 
will speak his name to succeeding generation, 
and that men will not willingly let the sound 
of it die awSy — that is a slight thing. I do 
say that it is possible for any man to achieve 
such sort of life as Abraham's — and so cer- 
tainly in the vision of God, and probably in 
the thought of many whom such a kind of life 
can not have failed to bless — come to a glorious 
ending at the last. This is possible. The 
qualities that made Abraham great are imi- 
table, because they are moral. This is the 
singular characteristic of that conspicuous 
life, that it stands on a pedestal of goodness. 
And so, while we gather round the death of 
Abraham, it ought not to be our main and 
sorrowful thought, that, as Abraham died, so 



* " Abraham the Friend of God," by Oswald Dykes, 
pages 319, 320. 



The End. % 159 

must we die too, and, most probably, in much 
less than half his time; our chief thought and 
question should be this rather, in view of that 
End we are so sure and so soon to reach, Are 
we living such a life as Abraham's, and thus 
getting grandly ready for the End ? 

Let us look, then, together now at some of 
these imitable moral qualities which go toward 
the making of a true life, and yet woven into 
the crown of a glorious End. 

Consider Abraham's devotion to Duty. 

Man is a being set in relations. No man is 
independent. No man is a simple unit flung 
into life unbound to any other units. When 
the ivy climbs up ruins, and binds lovingly the 
falling stones together, and swathes them with 
verdure, it clambers and winds about and 
helps and beautifies because of. the feelers it 
thrusts out, laying hold by them of the crum- 
bling stones. It is the nature of the ivy to 
force these feelers out. So forth from every 
man there are shooting feelers of relations. 
They are a part of his life-endowment. They 
come with life. 

Man is bound into relation with God. Man 



160 Present Lessons f torn Distant Days. 

comes forth from God. He finds himself here 
in this wonderful existence the result of a dis- 
tinct thought and volition on the part of God. 
Into that dark unknown preceding his con- 
scious being, there is but one word which can 
flash the light of explanation and efficiency, 
and that word is — God. God is Creator, and 
therefore man must stand to God in the rela- 
tion of the created one : or creature. But God 
is more than Creator. God is Father and 
Providence and Sustainer and King and Judge. 
And so again, man must stand to God in the 
relation of son and dependent and subject, and 
of a being amenable to the Divine Justice. 

But, sharing life with a man, there are mul- 
titudes of other beings. Neither can man 
stand in any way disassociated from these. 
With these, innumerable relations bind him to- 
gether. Men and women are to each other in 
the relation of father and mother and child, and 
husband and wife, and sister and brother, and 
relative and friend, and buyer and seller, and 
employer and employe, and fellow-townsman 
and fellow-citizen, and so on and on endlessly. 
Into less or more of these relations every man 



The End. 



IOI 



is thrust. He can not help himself. He throws 
these relations out toward others, and others 
throw them out toward him, and thus men are 
intertwisted with each other inextricably and 
irrevocably. 

Now, springing out of these relations, in 
which we thus stand toward God and toward 
each other, there are forced upon us certain 
Duties from the sacred obligations of which we 
can not free ourselves. What is a Duty ? Wh) r , 
it is something due from me to God, to myself, 
to somebody else. It is something which I 
owe, and therefore it is something which I 
ought. If I am standing in such relation to- 
ward God as I have indicated, I must owe God 
the Duties springing out of such relations — the 
Duty of filialness, gratitude, loyalty, obedience. 
If I am standing toward men in such relation 
as I have indicated, I must feel toward men 
the moral pressure of the Duties appropriate to 
such relations — the Duty of justice and help- 
fulness and obedience where I should obey, and 
love where I ought to love. 

These are very fundamental statements. 
The eye was made for the light, and responds 
ii 



1 62 Present Lessons from Distant Days, 

instinctively to its touch in vision. The hu- 
man soul was made for Duty, for fitness with 
its real relations, and responds instinctively to 
their presence in the consciousness of obliga- 
tion. 

What, then, must be the true life — the truest 
■ — the life which may go on fearlessly to its end- 
ing, as the day passes to the glories of the sun- 
set? Must it not be the life which is quick ir; 
its response to Duty ? which gathers its ener 
gies and marshals its powers under the Bannei 
of the Ought? "There is in life something 
better than ease and comfort, more delightful 
than pleasure, more golden than gold " ; and 
when I quote these words from a great writer, 
you can not help the feeling of their truth ; and 
you know well what that something is : it is 
the recognition of Duty and Submission to it. 

What signal devotion to Duty appears now 
in the life of Abraham. Not always, and per- 
fectly, I know, but preponderatingly, and as 
the more constant rule. How that call of God 
came crashing into his usual life. How it tore 
it from its former rooting places of seventy-five 
long years. How it snapped the tenacious ties 



The End. 163 

of family relationship. How it made him an 
exile from his birthplace. How it demanded 
that he turn his back utterly upon the known, 
and turn his face utterly toward the unknown^ 
glimmering amid whose shifting mists there 
was only this slight beacon — a Unto a land that 
I shall show thee." 

It was a stern and saddening face which 
Abraham's Duty wore ; but recognizing it as 
the face of Duty, he would go whither her 
finger pointed. 

Or, take that steady climbing of the Mount 
of Sacrifice. The Laughter of his heart, the 
stay of his old age, the fresh life budded upon 
the stem of his withered branch, the reward of 
faith, the actualization of the promises, the star 
which made the future bright; his own son to 
be the victim, and to be smitten by his own 
hand — and yet was not this the syllable formed 
upon the lips of Duty, that he should yield just 
this and do just this? It was enough. The 
heart' of Abraham might bleed. But his hands 
should not falter. He would carry fire and 
knife. He would build the altar. He would 
lay the wood upon it, and bind and lay on that 



1 64 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

even his best beloved, and grasp the knife to 
consummate the sacrifice. It 'was enough that 
above all there sounded the terrible yet certain 
tones of Duty. Abraham would not rebel. He 
would obey. 

Or, turning from Duty rendered Godward, 
behold it rendered manward, too. Take but 
this single instance. How Lot had injured 
him ; how greedy had been his selfish grasp- 
ing ; what slight regard toward priority of 
age, of*of relationship, or of position he had 
shown ; how careless had he been that his 
uncle Abraham should have for pasture only 
the rugged mountain heights, while he clutched 
all the fertile plain. Yet, when Lot was cap- 
tured and carried off a prisoner, how quickly 
was the Duty of assistance which Abraham 
owed him even, replied to. How cleanly 
Abraham put away from himself the mean ex- 
cuse, which we are so apt to make, that, be- 
cause Lot had so manifestly failed in his Duty 
toward him, therefore he was quit of the Duty 
he owed his relative. How did the fact of 
his Duty here steer Abraham into personal 
risk and military valor. It was enough that 



The End. 165 

Duty called. She was highest ; all else was 
lower. 

Was not all this as it ought to be? Was not 
all this the resolute adjustment of one's self to 
one's true relations? Does not the sunshine 
of a quite celestial nobleness gild such a life as 
this ? Is it not true that there was for Abra- 
ham something better than ease and comfort — 
more delightful than pleasure, more golden 
than gold? 

And is it not true that what was thus so 
magisterial in the life of Abraham ought to be 
sovereign in your life and mine as well ? And 
is not this true also, that it can be — that such 
moral quality is something imitable ? And 
that as Abraham could not reach a shining 
End without it, so neither can you, nor I, nor 
any other person. Oh, let that prayer with 
which Wordsworth's great ode to Duty closes 
be our prayer also. It is not possible that we 
live any true life, and so come to any blissful 
ending, except it be our prayer. 

11 To humbler functions, awful Power, 
I call Thee ; I myself commend 



1 66 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

Unto Thy guidance from this hour ; 
Oh, let my weakness have an end ! 
Give unto me, made lowly wise, 
The spirit of self-sacrifice ; 
The confidence of wisdom give, 
And in the light of truth Thy Bondman 
let me live." 



Will you now take another point of view 
and look at Abraham's carriage of himself self- 
ward? Will you notice the Integrity of the 
man ? Take here but a single instance — you 
remember how it was. There was wSodom 
gleaming with its white walls amid the verd- 
ure. It was a place most beautiful; it was a 
place most wealthy ; but it was a place most 
sinful. Everything within it had gathered to 
itself the taint of sin. The four kings from 
the North and East come down and smite it ; 
and after the vanquishing* battle, carry off with 
them many of its inhabitants as captives and 
its property as booty. Abraham organizes his 
military, expedition, and by skillful surprise re- 
captures all, and brings back safely all. And 
the king of Sodom, thinking that surely Abra- 
ham will demand some high reward, anticipates 



The End. 167 

the supposed demand, and says, " Give rae the 
persons, and take the goods to thyself." Abra- 
ham receives the proposition almost as an af- 
front. He will have nothing to do with that 
upon which sin has so manifestly cast its stain. 
He will enter into no partnership with evil. 
He will be enriched by no gain reaching him 
through crooked channels. He will be poorer 
for the sake of a righteousness unflawed. It 
is with a kingly port this man disdains such 
temptation. " I have lifted up mine hand unto 
the Lord, the most high God, the possessor of 
heaven and earth, that I will not take from a 
thread even to a shoe-latchet, and that I will 
not take anything that is thine, lest thou 
shouldest say, I have made Abram rich."* No 
guilty partnerships for him. No mean and 
mercenary tricks of trade ; no dodging sleights 
of hand, plucking gain out of wrong methods ; 
or, to put it into the speech of our own day, 
no renting of his property for liquor-selling or 
for other evil doings, because rent for such pur- 
poses is higher and steadier, and the man owns 



Gen. xiv. 22, 23. 



1 68 Present Lessons froi?i Distant Days. 

a most convenient corner ; no convenient mis- 
representations by his clerks while the pro- 
prietor sits back in his office with what he calls 
clean lips; but rather an integrity as hard 
against such things, as is the surface of some 
granite Egyptian obelisk, whose faintest sculpt- 
urings the tempests of three thousand years 
have not even dimmed. 

But such things are in the Bible, men say, 
and must stay there. They will not do for 
Wall Street and Broadway. And so men speak 
on and go on, getting their measures from 
standards simply worldly, and excusing them- 
selves because they are no worse than their 
neighbors. And yet every time they speak 
thus and do thus they are absolutely sure they 
are false to their better natures — to the immu- 
table standard of the Right. 

" What is a man, 
If the chief use and market of his time 
Is but to sleep and feed — a beast no more." 

But a man can not get out of himself the 
deathless feeling that he is more than that, and 
that the chief use and market of his time is 
that he may lift and keep lifted a steady shaft 



The End. 169 

of stern integrity ; that he ought to do it ; that 
such quality in Abraham is a quality imi- 
table, and that the radiance of a noble ending 
can rest only upon such a life. 

But there is another and a last thing that 
must be said : Devotion to Duty Godward and 
Manward ; Integrity of the self — such things as 
these can not stand on nothing. They must 
have soil firm and fertile out of which to grow. 
Resolution, simply, can not cause and nurture 
them. Any human will, by itself only, is weak, 
swaying, failing amid the buffetings of life. 

Abraham was thus devoted to his Duty and 
unbroken in Integrity and illustrative of many 
other noblest qualities, because, first of all, and 
undermost, he got grasp on God by Faith. 
Faith lifted him into the presence and vision 
of God, and Faith held him there. And there, 
in that absolute commitment of himself to God, 
and in that unrelaxing grip upon God's prom- 
ises — like Milton's Una in the wilderness so 
caught up into purity that no impurity could 
distract her thought and every evil and damag- 
ing thing fell away abashed — so for Abraham, 
meaner matters could not entice, and lower 



170 Present Lessons from Distant Days. 

ways of life could not get at him with their so- 
licitations. Faith filled his life with God, and 
so God held him and God kept him. And 
this quality of Faith is imitable as well. Do 
you want it ? would you build your life upon 
it ? would you have the right made easy 
through it ? Then as Abraham did, with con- 
secration unreserved, give yourself to God and 
you shall have it. 

The time is passing. To the End we must 
all come. That End shall be base or noble, as 
the life has lent itself to baseness or been mar- 
ried to nobility. 

This is the question ; not, when shall I meet 
the End ? but, how shall I meet the End ? 

11 Have we not all, amid life's petty strife, 
Some high ideal of a noble life 
That once seemed possible ? Did we not hear 
The flutter of its wings and feel it near ? 
And just within our reach it was ; and yet 
We lost it in this daily jar and fret, 
And now live idly in a vain regret. 
And still our place is kept, and it will wait 
Ready for us to fill it soon or late. 
No star is ever lost we once have seen — 
We always may be what we might have been." 



The End. 171 

True, true, Christ can lift us even to our 
ideal if we will have it so. He can make even 
our lives beautiful and our endings glorious. 
Now, while the day lasts, now is the accepted 
time. But let us beware, while the years hast- 
en and the shadows thickly fall, lest the End 
come suddenly and we wake into eternity to 
find ourselves even beyond the help of Christ 1 — 
to find it all for us too late, too late. " So then 
they that be of Faith are blessed with faithful 
Abraham " — but only they. 



